This little bit:
4. Sunflowers:: seeds
... reminded me of my eleventh grade Italian teacher.
In ninth and tenth grade, we had Mrs Rabaiotti. She was a fabulous Italian teacher and any Italian that I still speak I can attribute directly to her teaching. But after my tenth grade year, her husband bought a store and she left teaching to work there or some ridiculous thing, and we got Miss Markowski instead.
Miss Markowski was actually a guidance counselor - and not a particularly good one, at that. But she was hopeless as an Italian teacher. She would bring in random Italian movies for us to watch whenever we had long lunch classes. Her accent was awful. And she just lacked common sense.
I can remember her sitting on her desk talking about something not remotely related to the study of the Italian language. She was eating sunflower seeds and she stopped midsentence and stared at the seeds. She then said, "I wonder where sunflower seeds come from."
In a tone that was tinged with the word, "DUH!" the class proclaimed, "Sunflowers."
Miss Markowski actually looked surprised. "Oh. Yeah. I guess that makes sense."
Intellectual giant, huh?