Bizarre Teaching Moment #1: Close Encounters

~Hi everyone. Up until now, I've been posting mostly about my travels around Japan, but most of my time here (i.e., 10-11 hours a day) is spent working at a small English school for children. I'd like to share some of my more bizarre teaching moments with you (and by 'you', I mean Stef). Please understand that out of respect for privacy, I won't be posting pictures of my students or of the school itself. Disclaimer aside, here is the first of my strange teaching moments:

Today at work, I had my weekly, 50-minute private lesson with a boy who is around ten years old. We were playing an easy warmup game where you have to name one thing in English for each letter of the alphabet. When we got to 'Q', he thought for a moment and said, "Queen Alien." Naturally, I immediately asked him what his favorite movie was, and my carefully-planned lesson promptly collapsed. You can probably guess what we spent the next half-hour talking about:

^ Blatant product placement.

Of course, the awkward part came when I had to explain to the boy's father (through a translator) what his son had learned in today's lesson. I thought it might be a bad idea to say that today's vocabulary words were 'pulse rifle', 'APC', 'android', 'smart gun', 'flamethrower', 'sentry gun', and 'game over, man!'. I should have made flash cards! Luckily, I did manage to deliver the real lesson (the names of different rooms at school) in the last five minutes, which was enough to satisfy the parent.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. This student's hobby is collecting insects (particularly butterflies), and his favorite food (and your Word of the Post) is hachi no ko, which is bee larvae. It's typically served as a snack before beer (I can only assume that this grade school student abstains from that). Hachi no ko (or hachinoko) literally translates to 'Young of Bee' [Hachi=bee, no=of, ko=young]:

^ Yummie! How 'bout some Budweiser to wash that down?

Oh, and in case you were wondering, his word for the letter 'A' was AK-47, and 'G' was 'Glock'. I'm a little scared now. Stay tuned for more bizarre teaching moments from Nagaoka! Oyasumi~