Meaning
The early-years classroom ritual - a child brings an object from home and explains it to the class - and, by extension, any occasion where something personal is produced and talked through in public, willingly or otherwise. Warm in the classroom, wry outside it - the phrase implies the thing shown is personal and the telling unrehearsed. Regional use: General English; North American classroom origin.
Origin
The practice is so familiar it seems ancient, but its origins are undocumented and recent: the record finds it written about as early as 1954, in the American education journal Childhood Education, and the name show and tell - with its cousins show and share and sharing time - spread through the English-speaking world's early classrooms, used to build storytelling, communication, and public speaking while connecting home to school. Educators have argued about it ever since: it is praised as the child's first presentation and criticized for eating classroom time and punishing the shy. The figurative use long ago left the schoolroom - any disclosure session, evidence reveal, or awkward demonstration now borrows the name - and the dictionaries file the phrase as the education entry plus idiom, the classroom made portable.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- sharing time
- show and share
Usage Examples
- The takeover defence opened with show and tell: one prototype, one patent, one very calm engineer.
- Her therapist calls it show and tell week - bringing the actual receipts to the actual session.
- Every product launch is show and tell now; the tell is expected to fit inside ninety seconds.