Exploring proverbs in the Year 9 philosophy class.
Communications in our teenagers' postmodern world is characterised by the ten second news grab, the enigmatic email, the cryptic answer phone message and the right to-the-point chat room remark. Consequently, we teachers of philosophy can find ourselves constantly inviting our students to explain, elaborate, or rephrase in other words the rather too short comments they make in philosophy sessions. Within this world of stenographics, it occurred to me that an exploration of the traditional wisdom contained in idioms and proverbs would provide grist for discussion to suit their communication style.
The following is an account and initial evaluation of a staged lesson, repeated with different groups of Year 9 mixed boys and girls from suburban Brisbane independent schools in October 2004. I have entitled it Bytes of Wisdom since much of the point of the sessions from my planning point of view was to open up the treasury of common proverbs as riches of our language in stand alone sessions. As parents of a living heritage, as sources for insight into the experience of living the examined life, and as memorable byte-sized packages, proverbs do require some unpacking. My hunch proved quite successful; the discussion was rich and informative and their learning was obvious.
For resources, I drew from a very helpful article, Marjorie H. Holden and Mimi Warshaw, "A bird in the hand and a bird in the bush: using proverbs to teach skills and comprehension" English Journal 3 (February 1985), 63-67, and some handout teaching materials by Janet Aaker Smith (1987). Holden and Warshaw offer observations for the English teacher on literary forms like personification, the genre of aphorism, rhetorical devices, grammatical turns, the history and origins of proverbs, poetic language, levels of abstraction and poetic imagery in proverbs. My concern however was not to explicate the indirect statements of truth they contain, but to plot the interpretative steps we took to reach our satisfactory meanings. I was keen to explore the polyvalences that proverbs offer in deeper meanings and symbolic references. The study of language is indeed interesting but I facilitated a search for these more philosophical skills and dimensions.
Context
To open discussion, I invited the students to consider why we might be exploring proverbs printed on the first handout sheet within the context of a philosophy lesson. The Book of Proverbs is in the bible. Surely philosophy was to be found in books, in logic, in the insights of the great philosophers? Philosophy was taught and learned, not discovered; bought in courses and belonged to the learned, wasn't it? They agreed that wisdom was not necessarily found in commercial courses, or in just getting older. Whatever wisdom counted for happiness was active reflection upon experience; that seeking wisdom was a desire to make good decisions based on reasonable responses to the options available. Socrates was right to say that the unexamined life was not worth living. The happier person was one who had gained the habit of critically and actively reflecting on experience, both his or her own experience and that of others too. I suggested that the inherited proverbs were just such bytes of wisdom, whose validity stands or falls on their relevance to particular circumstances.
Progressing the session
On that basis, we proceeded to unpack some very common proverbs, seeking interim meanings in their rhetorical, semantic and immediate applications, and then to reformulate them in some more generalised statements of advice.
Along with adults listening, I was surprised with these young people's unfamiliarity with the proverbs. Some had heard some few but even fewer could not go that next step to elaborate what they might mean. Discussion round the group centred for a time on clarification and articulation, veering between particular and general, between guesses and satisfactory explanations. I was satisfied to invite, expect and affirm fragmentary and notional suggestions until the discussing community felt a firmer ground had been reached. In this process of exploring the semantics, the unusual grammatical forms and the agricultural references, they began to break the ice in broaching this topic. It was satisfying to watch the faces light up in agreement and recognition.
My next stage was to move to work in pairs to sort through some more selections, finding matched and opposite meanings in pairs of proverbs. Matching pairs of proverbs found include: Birds of a feather flock together/A man is known by the company he keeps, People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones/The pot calls the kettle black, and Deeds not words/The proof of the pudding is in the eating. This step practised some associative thinking, some insightful comprehension and some valuable discussion in pairs. As teacher my role was merely to affirm recorded responses and discuss variations.
The next (postmodern) step was to find cracks in the wisdom. We found proverbs that contradicted one another and we questioned how this could be so. No grand narrative or continuum of revelations here! This took some effort to read, discuss and think about meanings they could glean so as to find examples of proverbs that gave opposite advice and proverbs that offered similar advice. Examples of oppositions included: Fine feathers make fine birds./You can't judge a book by its cover, Too many cooks spoil the broth/Many hands make light work, and look before you leap/He who hesitates is lost.
By virtue of associative thinking, others came to mind: "Fortune favours the bold" echoes "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" and "a dog in the manger" is similar to the bird who "feathers his own nest." Admittedly as indicated already, some teacher input quickened the rate of recall and association, but as one student remarked, after getting over the initially difficult encounter with the genre of aphorism and this poetic language, an abundance of associations then followed with greater ease. Here I also noted the non-inclusive language unselfconsciously used in this traditional and more historical material.
A more interesting and creative step was to consider proverbs across cultures. Holden and Warshaw (1985) supply some Japanese, Chinese, Hausa and German proverbs (in translation) to consider pairing with traditional English speaking ones. If longer time was available and I had a more cultural orientation, one might venture into their social and historical contexts as a way to interpret them. As it was, we had to be content to accept surface readings. We found that the Hebrew proverb "When the kettle boils over, it overflows its own sides" could be echoed in the English language, "Don't cut off your nose to spite your face" and that the German proverb, "One ass nicknames another "Longears'," is like "The pot calls the kettle black" in our language. This process of cross-cultural transaction, if indeed it was rather simplistic and surface rendering, did offer windows of insight for variant readings, assessing matches/mismatches and eliciting wonder and curiosity about the sources and expressions of traditional embedded wisdom.
Exploring proverbs: A discussion plan
1. Read some common proverbs for meaning.
2. Match proverbs that have similar meanings.
3. Pair proverbs that have opposite meanings.
4. Compare proverbs that come from different cultures.
5. Change common proverbs for comic or surprising effect.
6. Remove disguised language round common proverbs.
7. Evaluation.
Philosophical Skills Practised
G Smith, 2004
My fifth stage was to turn common proverbs round for surprising or comic effect. I supplied some examples found on the internet such as: "When the blind leadeth the blind -- get out of the way" and "Where there's smoke, there's -- pollution." The students caught on readily enough with light humour in contributions like: "Don't bite the hand that -- looks dirty' and "Strike while the -- bug is close." In the short time available and within the constraints of the day, this more creative step was not so thoroughly pursued as I hope to at another time.
My sixth step was to read some disguised proverbs so as to recognise the common ones they contained. I am grateful to Janet Smith's materials for this step. "Readers of this journal will no doubt find the so-called hidden proverbs in such as: "Pulchritude doesn't extend below the surface of the dermis," "Compute not your immature gallinaceans prior to their being produced" and "Precipitancy creates prodigality." The scribe is pleased to make more of these are available upon request. More able students, perhaps the more literary-canny ones, really enjoyed this bit of deconstructive fun stripping away the pompous words. I was pleased that the activity led to some ready talk, some excited findings and some sense of achievement on a hot Brisbane afternoon.
Review
Proverbs are rather short enigmatic sayings containing familiar truths or wise advice. They offer a sometime fragmentary folk wisdom for living, demonstrating that our cultural inheritance can offer some richer insights about life than the media does. They can be read at literal, emotional or abstract levels. I found these byte-sized chunks of reflected-upon experience have become a neglected resource in our schools, for most of these Year 9 students did not know many of the common ones or much about them. Perhaps the horse has bolted and it is too late to teach old fashioned axioms. I am now glad I took the bull by the horns, risking my belief that fortune favours the bold for I could never do things by halves for enough is as good as a feast.
As a facilitator of community of inquiry, I practised patience as a virtue and prevented fear giving itself wings when I trialled a pretty kettle of fish in these discussions; I believe I did not cook my own goose. I now trust that reading here about my experience others too may find that virtue is found in the middle. It may be teasing to find that birds of a feather flock together, but actually philosophers will always find the proof in the pudding of action. I invite you too to let the cat out of the bag, to share the riches of the living inheritance that we have in conventional proverbs. Sometimes the first step is the hardest and we need to cut our cloth to suit our audience. But I disproved the dictum that speech is silver, silence is golden. QED. #
References
Nigel Hawkes, "Misleading messages from the horse's mouth" The Times Science editor, n.d.
Holden, M.H., and Warshaw, M., ‚"A bird in the hand and a bird in the bush: using proverbs to teach skills and comprehension" English Journal 3 (February 1985), 63-67.
Janet Aaker Smith, Proverb Puzzle,and 16 Puzzling proverbs. Private circulation Melbourne, 1987.