11 Comments

I really like this idea. I looked online and found a website called World of Proverbs that has a large selection. The only thing that the website seems to lack is a 'random' button. I wonder if anyone else has good sources of proverbs that would allow me to outsource the burden of settling on which one to pick.

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Thanks, Andrew — I edited the text to put that in!

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Great idea! Of course, some of our Brazilian proverbs are not that suitable for the classroom. I wouldn'r recommend picking up "The little bird who eats stones knows what kind of a**hole it has" ("Passarinho que come pedra sabe o c* que tem") - this is an actual proverb, hahahaah.

But, more seriously, we have "blacksmith's house, wooden stick"; "in a blind country, he who has an eye is king", "God helps those who get up early", "to the one who loves the ugly, beautiful it seems to him", "curiosity killed the cat", "scalded cat is afraid of cold water", "bird who sleeps with bat wakes up upside-down", "soft water on hard rock, keeps hitting till it pierces", "for a good understander, half a word is enough" or alternatively "for a good understander, a dot [the one that goes on to top of an 'i'] is the whole letter", "rush is the enemy of perfection", "at night, all cats are dun".

I definitely could go on, this one I think is a great idea. I know I use some foreign ones, such as "speech is silver, silence is golden", "still waters run deep" and "blood is thicker than water".

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Ha! That one about the bird probably wins some sort of cute/raunchy-mashup prize. I didn’t mention it, but man, reading world proverbs for this reminded me of how un-PC cultures have been throughout history. (Some of the ones on the topic of “wives” were borderline horrifying… and that’s from a compiler who said he had worked hard to take out the worst ones.)

One thing that none of my examples showed, in any case, was how mystifying some of these can be —which is WONDERFUL. (I think I understand the phenomenon that "blacksmith's house, wooden stick" points at, but it’s still opaque, and I find it all the more intriguing for it.)

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On the wives: of course, I skipped most of the ones which are no longer accepted wisdom. Before I get to it, it reminds me that most of these sayings/proverbs are actually rhymes ("Deus ajuda quem cedo madruga"), alliterations ("a pressa é inimiga da perfeição"), or just sound great due to unusual phrasing ("a quem ama o feio, bonito lhe parece"). So it will be hard to get kids to stick to these foreign sayings if they're not "musical" to their ears.

Ok, back to the wife thing. Here in Brazil, we had this saying, "em briga de marido e mulher, ninguém mete a colher" (rhyme); this meant "when husband and wife are fighting, no one sticks a spoon" (the verb here is tricky). Obviously, this is not acceptable anymore and we even had a nationwide campaign whose slogan was only "Yes, I stick a spoon", "eu meto a colher, sim!", calling people to interfere in situations of domestic abuse or violent quarrels, getting the police involved.

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It suddenly strikes me that the "WHOA" realization I had about how casual misogyny was in the past is, well, a good piece of education. Thus, there's probably some theoretical value in talking about these proverbs, though (1) not in elementary school, and (2) honestly, I'm not sure I'd even bring them up in high school.

It makes me feel weird to say that, but I'm cognizant of how proverbs are memetically powerful. I'm very much in favor of including ethically-horrible IDEAS in the high school curriculum, but I suddenly realize that I'm much less in favor of including ethically-horrible PROVERBS, for precisely the same reasons that they could be such a boon to the rest of the curriculum.

Huh. Interesting.

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Yes, great reflection - to deal with these memes is somewhat akin to dealing with chemical compounds.

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[I'll make the same comment I always make (there's probably a proverb for that :-0)]

This feels like putting the cart before the horse. The reason proverbs worked in tradtiional cultures is because they were *embedded in the culture*. They were pithy summaries of core values that helped maintain group identity. And the proverbs that survived were precisely those that reinforced adaptive responses to common situations were important to the group.

A great example of this is the (Japanese?) proverb, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down." I imagine you would not want to teach that. Why not? Because that isn't the value you want to model and inculcate, right?

So, I'll go back to my perennial question: what are the values you want to indoctrinate students into? How are you modeling those? And how does this impact which proverbs you (or we) should choose?

P.S. I'm fine with 'this is what I will address with my History Wars post in September', but I feel like this practice will come across to kids as superficial if these deeper "embodied value" questions are not explicitly addressed.

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Or perhaps this could be another opportunity to teach critical reading (aka, context) AND maybe also to also wonder/explore different cultures and values?

I would find immense value in exposing students to "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down" and can think of many discussion/exploratory questions: What could this mean both then... and now? What could this tell us about the culture of the source community's cultural values/time/place behind this proverb? How could this help us understand elements of our culture here and now where we live today? (Frankly when I think back to middle school and high school dynamics, this proverb sounds quite familiar...)

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Good point, Ernest. I do think that the 'nail' proverb you mention is still relevant in that it provides a heuristic that is useful in a number of social situations, however inapplicable it may be to life in general. It might be interesting to frame proverbs in pairs that point in exactly opposite directions and then have kids think about when to apply the wisdom they intend to transmit. I can imagine a group learning and memorizing a great many proverbs and then selecting from among them to decide norms for the group. Of course, there's nothing stopping a teacher or parent from pre-selecting key proverbs that match the specific values they want to communicate.

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Oooh, I needed a new homeschool idea to mix things up a bit as my kid and I are both very clearing in the spring slump right now... Excellent timing!

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