Singapore math
I have a bad habit of trying to insert a chengyu (成语; cheng2 yu3) in my talks wherever I can. The one for today is: 不耻下问 (bu4 chi3 xia4 wen4), from Confucius, who described someone as unafraid of learning from subordinates (asking those below you, literally). I brought that in after putting up a data table from the TIMSS-R results that show Singapore at the top in Math and seocnd in Science at 8th grade, with the U.S. somewhere below. A very sharp group of people…hope I have more chances to interact with them.
This is also an experiment to see how Chinese characters work in WordPress. Now that I am officially a member of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, I’d better work on my Chinese. They, by the way, have the coolest letterhead ever, with a huge seal carved in ancient characters (the one shown on the first page of their website).
UPDATE: Xiaobin told me about this site, where you can enter a character and get all the 成语 containing it.