Tag Archives: educational

Hammer and Nail

Text

Interviewee: In a summer camp I attended while in elementary school, my teacher told us about this proverb: “If you are holding a hammer, everything you see is a nail.” In Chinese: “手里拿着锤子，看什么都像钉子.”

Hammer and nail are a perfect duo. However, when a hammer becomes the only tool you reach for, it distorts perception. In this proverb, the message is that if you always hold a hammer and see everything as a nail, you will forever be seeing this world through a single, fixed way of thinking.

It was a simple, concrete way for my teacher to educate me about not being hindered by my preconceived notions—my “hammer”—when seeing the world. It’s about teaching kids to have an open mind and think outside of the box sometimes.

Context:

My interviewee first encountered this proverb in China, shared by a teacher when she was attending a summer camp as an elementary school student.

Analysis:

This proverb is an educative proverb that teaches the audience about cognitive bias using the metaphor of a hammer and nail. It is vernacular because, while this was shared in a summer camp by a teacher, this proverb wasn’t in the textbook, and neither was it formally written down. It’s essentially a metaphor about having an open mindset: it warns against the human tendency to fit problems to our existing solutions rather than seeking solutions suited to the actual problem.

Genre analysis:
Metaphorical structure: This proverb’s metaphorical structure—using a concrete, well-known physical object to metaphorically render an abstract lesson—is characteristic of a proverb.

Sentence structure / phoenetics: In addition, the sentence structure in Chinese—each clause having the exact same number of Chinese characters—makes this proverb rhyme and easier to remember and tell from a structural/phonetic perspective.

How To Unscrew A Bolt

Nationality: American
Age: 59
Occupation: Psychology Professor
Residence: Forest Falls, CA
Language: English

Text:

“Lefty loosey, righty tighty.”

Context:

Informant, KB, stated that he learned this saying from his dad, who often used tools and did handiwork for the family. KB said that one would say this phrase “to someone when they are putting a wrench on a bolt and they’re not sure which way to turn it to loosen it.”

Analysis:

This proverb provides practical guidance on unscrewing bolts or screws. It is especially memorable because it is succinct and utilizes rhyming and alliteration. This phrase might be used more commonly in parenting or mentoring contexts, in which the listener is just learning to use wrenches or screwdrivers for some kind of mechanical project or task.

Advanced Easter Egg Hunt

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 25th, 2012
Primary Language: English

“So, my mom is an artist, she’s a painter, and my dad did, um like a lot of writing and stuff, he’s like an English dude. He’s American. Anyways. Um, for Easter, we would, we would have Easter Egg hunts, my sister and I. And um, it started off, we’d come, we’d come downstairs and there’d be these Easter eggs, and you’d open it, and it’d be a scrap of paper that would be cut in a weird shape, and on one side would be like, a part of a drawing, but you don’t know what the drawing is, and on the other side, would be, um, a clue. A poem or a limerick my dad made. That would lead you to, it would be a clue to like, find the next egg, in a different part of the house. And so you’d read the clues and try to find each egg, until you, you finally find the basket. And each of these papers, its the poem on one side and the drawing on the other, and once you got the basket, you’d have all the pieces, you assemble them and you tape it together, and then you’d flip it over and it’d be, like my mom would have, um, she’d uh, she’d have drawn like an Easter themed drawing, like one of them was like me from my senior yearbook photo, but with bunny ears drawn on, and she, um, also drew like the Scream, but with like bunny ears. It’d be a clever take on Easter themes.”

 

This tradition interests me, because it takes the candy, which is usually what Easter is about for kids, and makes it secondary. The riddle clues the source’s dad wrote are almost a sneaky way of making Easter Egg Hunts educational. It is also a way for both of the source’s parents to pass down their love for the arts to their children, and it worked, as the source never mentioned candy once when talking about the Easter Egg Hunt, she remembers her parents for being artists, and taking time to create something for her and her sister.