Stone soup

I wasn’t proud of most of my teaching today (understatement) but written into the schedule at the school we’re borrowing was a 20-minute Mandarin lesson at the end of the school day for the British pupils. The Chinese organisers of our Chinese group were not pleased at having that foisted on them unannounced so I said that with my two words and three characters of Mandarin I’d do it as long as I could call on them for help. It was the best batch of stone soup I’ve made in ages.

I drew a ‘no entry’ sign on the board and asked the pupils what it meant. Drew a Union Jack on the board and asked them what it symbolised. Once they realised that we use characters/ideograms in European languages too I asked a Chinese teacher to draw the character for ‘tree’ (it looks like a tree) and got the British students to guess what it was. Then ‘forest’ (two tree characters). Then ‘big forest’ (three tree characters). Then the character for ‘person’ (it looks like a stick person without the head). By which time the Chinese teacher was up and away, a second one was joining in and I was redundant.

And I learnt that ‘crowd’ is, predictably, two stick people.

Apologies – I have another week of being useless at commenting.