Do you have potatoes in your ears?

Last night some of my students wanted to go out for coffee to celebrate my birthday because one of the girls won't be able to come to class next week (when we're supposed to go out celebrating) because she is going on vacation. We thought it was going to be a small group, but it ended up being a larger group. It was fun because they wanted to still speak English (it was my advanced class) and so they were using all their new vocabulary and idioms from class on "confrontational situations."

I was told I "have a screw loose" many times. I really need to be careful about the idioms I teach.

But anyways, Anita was giving me her cell phone number and I just couldn't hear her. So I kept saying "What? What?" Finally she said "How do you say" Are you hearing?" I laughed and said, "Well, we say 'Are you deaf'" "Ah yes, yes... so LeAnne - are you deaf?" So we laughed and talked about some things we say when people don't hear us when we speak. So we went over "Clean the dirt out of your ears," "You got potatoes growing in your ears?" and so on... we even talked about that nasty wax build-up...

So a bit later, Anita wanted to ask me something but she didn't want Hrvoje, one of the guys in the class, to hear what she was going to ask me... so in English she asked him - "Can you make yourself deaf? You know, ...uh... put potatoes in your ears!" The look he gave her was so funny, and I just died laughing. Being the good teacher, I told Anita "We usually say, 'Can you please cover your ears' or 'Can you plug your ears for a moment.'"

I still can't get the image of him stuffing potatoes into his ears out of my mind...