::A Geek in Korea::

In one of my evening classes I had been forced to come up with proverbs on the spot when we got to a particular place in the book. I drew a blank when I was forced to think of specific sayings of wisdom. I hate being put on the spot and forced to come up with a series of interesting expressions on the spot unless it is in my wheelhouse of knowledge. I came back to class today prepared with a lot of cool proverbs. Where did I get proverbs? From a book that was almost 155 years old!

Google Books has recently become one of my favorite teaching resources. It’s got lots of very awesome texts that you can pull material from. They scanned this old book with lots of proverbs, then digitized it and put it on the internet. Because it was out of print and the rights to it had lapsed, I could use it with attribution in my class. That’s just what I did.

I grabbed all the best proverbs with longer descriptions and illustrations. Unfortunately I couldn’t use the .pdf file to extract the images, but I did get the characters to copy without retyping them all by hand with their archaic grammar and spelling. Then I built my lesson around identifying and explaining different proverbs.

The illustrated proverb book I chose has archaic rhyming poetry that explains proverbs! Yes! It’s so awesome to use in class that I was actually giddy finding different things for class to use. It is a gold mine of inside jokes. I got to use the word “bung hole” in proper context in class! How could I possibly pass on an opportunity like that?! I copy over the poetry as a hint, snag the proverb on the file I prepared, and separate them for my own list if I needed to hand out the hint sheet. I write the different proverbs on the board and ask for explanations of each.

The task of the student is to either identify the proverb from the old English poem hint if they didn’t know any of them, or use the hint and proverb to explain the lesson it teaches if they recognize the proverb when I write it on the board. Then if the students know any Korean language proverbs with the same lesson, we went over those translated in English as well. Almost all the English proverbs had a similar Korean idea too. Sometimes they lose a little in translation however.

This was a challenging, FUN, high level exercise that I did with a single student for an hour. I think with two or three more students it could be even more fun, as it would challenge them to explain and work together, and also interpret their opinions of the proverbs differently. I’ll be doing this in any high level class I teach in the future. I only pulled eight proverbs out of a 257 page book! I have dozens of other books to search too. Google Books has sped up my researching and my class planning considerably. I absolutely will take advantage of everything I ever need to research in the future with it first before I bother asking for a bunch of teaching materials from others. I can plan a more in depth bit of work at home, away from my teaching resources now because I never need to worry about having access to physical books anymore. That’s totally kick ass.