Being overlooked can be distressing but it is not the fault of the ideas – talk to the people running these things and ask or offer to take the lead on a future occasion. The phrase to teach one’s grandmother to suck eggs was therefore already proverbial in the early 18 th century. It pays to make it explicitly clear when sharing your thoughts and enthusiasm that you might not be the first person to hear of the ideas and that some people you are talking to will know all about it and may well be quite skilled and experienced already.

Stevens, of Francisco de Quevedo (Spanish author): [2] "You would have me teach my Grandame to suck Eggs". 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). The spinning version makes perfect sense: even as late as the 1500s, all women learned how to spin, and many of them spent most of their waking hours with a spindle in their hands.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. Teaching grandmother to suck eggs is an English-language saying, meaning that a person is giving advice to someone else about a subject that they already know about (and probably more than the first person). In 1707, Francisco de Quevedo coined the expression “Teaching your grandmother how to suck eggs”—a colourful reference to the fact that Spanish grannies who’d lost their teeth were adept at sucking eggy goodness through a pinhole in raw eggs. The saying still survives despite the fine art dying out in our "civilized" and salmonella fearing culture.

In fact, I see this as a relative of phrases such as "ass over teakettle" or "it's not rocket surgery": we know what they mean because we know the original phrases they refer to, not because they make any sense.Even if people are new to hearing about his work, the ideas Rosenshine describes are absolutely not new. I can sort of picture the conversation: "Granny, don't forget you need to poke a hole at both ends of the egg.