Grandmas are great fun

My grandma has language students staying with her on homestay visits, and from time to time they can’t do their homework, she can’t help, and so we get phonecalls of desperation begging us for answers on the most random things. Who was the tenth king of England? What’s a town in Dorset beginning with a J?? Who was the Roman God of agriculture???

Clearly, this is where I’ve been going wrong in my short career as an English teacher. Why spend time on fluency and conversation when all the students really need is to be able to complete an average pub quiz. Needless to say, most of the time we don’t happen to have that information on the tip of our tongues, but a quick trip to google can normally fill in  the blanks.

Last night was something else though – food and drink idioms.

Picture it. One bewildered Italian student with a piece of paper of photocopied pictures of foods and blanked out phrases. One grandma who has lost her reading glasses and whose hearing is not quite top notch. One dodgy phoneline. And, to make the entire exercise a bit more tricky, the photocopy hadn’t come out very well and even between them they couldn’t tell what half of them were supposed to be, and quickly reduced themselves to giggles.

“Potatoes maybe, but smaller…like peas. Except peas aren’t knobbly. No, not peas. Eggs? Or raspberries? Maybe nuts. But bigger…no, I think they must be potatoes, but not normal ones. Those special kinds of ones you get sometimes that look different. They’re stuck together. Or, it could be…what’s the word for that food, you know, pizza! No, not pizza….um…spaghetti!! Is there an idiom with spaghetti?? ” (sadly not grandma, no)

Now, how any picture, however badly photocopied, can potentially resemble potatoes, peas, eggs, raspberries, nuts and spaghetti(!), I simply cannot begin to imagine. Did have fun trying though! I’m almost tempted to take the train up and take a look at this crazy homework myself.

However, four phonecalls, two books, some frantic googling of random possibilities (egg feed? raspberry feed? pea feed? beer feed?...chicken feed!) and a lot of laughter and guesswork later. Hurrah! Sense of achievement!! The poor language student went straight to bed, completely exhausted and no doubt more confused than ever about this list of completely random phrases that make no literal sense and which she will probably never use anyway.

Maybe crazy and impossible homework is the way forward. Might apply that to my next group of unsuspecting students and see what amusement comes my way…