Sucking Eggs: What Your Wartime Granny Could Teach You about Diet, Thrift and Going Green

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Rosenshine’s principles are, for some teachers, especially in terms of reminding us all about clear communication of new knowledge and strategies. The English of which, he told us, was, That a child may sometimes teach his grandmother to suck eggs.

Some of these cookies are essential, while others help us to improve your experience by providing insights into how the site is being used.That isn't to say that removing the contents of an egg without breaking two holes in the shell is impossible. The Scots say : Learn your Goodam to make Milk-Kail (Milk-Pottage) or, Teach your Father to get Bairns (Children) Lat. The "shooting" (spraying) beer from a can with more than one hole in it" is not as dramatic as from a can with one hole in it. And if all feels a bit beneath you, well, in my experience, the more functional and grounded we get, the more progress we make in doing things better. Evidently, the reason that the Indians "could not suck eggs" wasn't because they didn't know the trick of opening a raw egg at both ends; rather, they "could not" because eating the egg uncooked was abominable to them.

For (fill in the blanks) industry in particular, the transportation of goods needs to run as smoothly as possible. It was such a commonplace procedure then that to "teach your grandmother to suck eggs" was like a child trying to teach as new something the grandmother well knew how to do. b) They are presented or perceived as a complete description of teaching… when, in reality, we know there are other things to think about too. Most likely the meaning of the idiom derives from the fact that before the advent of modern dentistry (and modern dental prostheses) many elderly people (grandparents) had very bad teeth, or no teeth, so that the simplest way for them to eat protein was to poke a pinhole in the shell of a raw egg and suck out the contents; therefore, a grandmother was usually already a practiced expert on sucking eggs and didn't need anyone to show her how to do it.But their awareness of "the manner of the white people" in sucking raw eggs suggests that this practice was fairly widespread among white people (in North America, anyway) at the time. Cotton spinners will sometimes use a distaff, sometimes not, depending on how their cotton was prepared.

The Wikipedia page on "Teaching grandmother to suck eggs" (cited in a comment beneath the original post above in a comment by Matt E. It’s up to us to give our prospects something they’ve never heard before—or never seen in quite the same way. So why don’t we make up our minds—once and for all—to stop teaching grandmas how to suck eggs and start telling them the good news about dental implants instead? Sucking an egg from a shell that has a single hole in it is not possible if done with the lips/mouth (and weasels don't have lips. Although not terribly complicated the idea being that trying to instruct your grandmother how to do this when she already knew (likely better than you) was rather futile.Isn’t there a difference between teaching egg-sucking and careful signposting that lets our audience know they’re in the right place?

c) They appear too obvious to be worth discussing or given any status – like we’re all a bit above describing our craft in functional everyday language. This proverb was used in Latin literature to condemn the presumption of stupid and ignorant people who would undertake to instruct those from whom they themselves should take instruction.The phrase to teach one’s grandmother to suck eggs was therefore already proverbial in the early 18 th century.