With little time or motivation to plan my classes or clean my teeth, I remembered I had a little treasure of a sequence of lessons up my sleeve so hooked it out, dusted it down and brought it back into the light.

My Ireland treasure in the run up to St Paddy's and bang whack in the middle of the Six Nations.  

I write The Emerald Isle on the board and wait.  The more perspicacious work out that Emerald looks like émeraude and Isle looks like île while one or two of the others are trying to push their neighbour's pencil case off the table with a ruler.

I push on, I muster my energy into a ball of glowing fire.  I elicit what? where?  They say Greenland and I say No.  I say; Think Six Nations and they say  'New Zealand', 'South Africa' and I wonder what they do every weekend in February/March in this part of the world they call L'Ovalie.


Eventually we get there and we're into a scrum of Leprechauns and rainbows and pots of gold which bore me to bits .I  want them to run fast with the ball and score a beautiful try but the game remains stodgy.

The bell rings for half time and I give them 5 minutes to get their act together, have a pee or a fag or what ever it takes to make this little team of language learners to take control of the ball.

Second half.  Match nul. The whistle blows.

End game.