Students’ mistakes are much more fun (London)

 

A listening comprehension piece last week with the Tuesday group featured a poor/impoverished man, which is 穷人 qióng rén in Chinese.

My usual practice is to then extend students’ vocabulary by giving other words/phrases using the word, 穷 qióng / poor in this case.  The word I gave was 穷光蛋 qióng guāng dàn with the literal breakdown (another usual teaching method of mine) of “poor bare egg”.  

I then asked the students to guess what the final meaning of 穷光蛋 might come to from the literal breakdown of the component parts.

One student (aged 83 and a good cook) remembered a listening comprehension piece I’d done with them last year, talking about how mainland Chinese people make their dough for dumpling skin based on the 三光 sān guāng principle.  No need to measure ratio of flour to water.  Just keep adding water to the flour while mixing it in with the hand, until the inside of the mixing bowl and the hand are bare of gooey dough.  (See blog https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2024/10/making-dough-for-dumpling-skin-london.html for more details.)

Going by the meaning of “bare” for 光 guāng in the 三光 dumpling skin story, and by the fact that when the dough is the right consistency, it stops being gooey, cleaving to the inside of the mixing bowl, and comes away, so that one can see the bottom of the bowl, this particular student’s offering for the man being a 穷光蛋 qióng guāng dàn / “poor bare egg” was that he was so poor one could see his bare bottom — because he didn’t have the money for enough material for his trousers to cover even his bottom.

I’ve always told students that I don’t want to retire, as I get so much fun out of teaching, even (or especially) when they make mistakes.

(London, 2024)