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

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Teaching ( your) grandmother to suck eggs is an English language saying that refers to a person giving advice to another person in a subject with which the other person is already familiar (and probably more so than the first person). I’ve seen a couple of people who’ve felt somewhat sidelined when newer, younger teachers were invited to present ideas instead of them.

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. 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. 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. It’s up to us to give our prospects something they’ve never heard before—or never seen in quite the same way. Marketing directors and managers may need to listen a lot more to them too—and start having a whale of a time themselves.Dating back to the early 13 th century, it is the oldest of the English terms of relationship formed with grand-. The English of which, he told us, was, That a child may sometimes teach his grandmother to suck eggs. The Goose leads out the Gosling to the field; (contrarie to the former, and an argument of a well-proportioned gouernment.

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. Raw eggs, with or without a little seasoning, used to be a popular food and were regarded as healthy. The phrase to teach one’s grandmother to suck eggs was therefore already proverbial in the early 18 th century. Which means that logistics processes and strategies need to be agile enough to respond to this challenging environment. And above all, emphasise that we’re largely improving what we do already rather than necessarily doing new things.Some of these cookies are essential, while others help us to improve your experience by providing insights into how the site is being used.

Sucking an egg from a shell that has a single hole in it is likely to be no more efficient than "shooting" a beer from a can that has only one opening in it. I guess my point is that – agreeing again with you, Tom, Rosenshine is making suggestions based on observations of effective teachers and teaching practices. 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. Of course no one element in Rosenshine’s is new; what is new is the fact that he had the temerity to curate the principles into one place.I still quote Rosenshine’s work, and subsequent replications of his work in more current terms – and I also quote your book, Tom! I clocked a twitter person recently protesting that, as far as they are concerned, ‘Rosenshine is patronising’. This is for two reasons: a) it shows some respect to those people who have been around the block a few times and b) unless you do this, they won’t be listening to what you say in any case; in fact they may well be actively antagonistic – for good reason. Teach your Grannum (Grandame) to suck Eggs (A Reproof to those, who think they have more Knowledge than the whole World, and will be ever and anon teaching those who have had more Experience than themselves. The Phrase Finder has "Don't try to teach your Grandma to suck eggs" is older than you might think, but without any explanation of the egg sucking part.