Bizarre Teaching Moment #6: Duck and Cover

~For my younger students, a large number of lessons are devoted to phonics. Many sounds in the English language simply don't appear in Japanese, or are blended together into one sound. To make the lessons fun, many of the books contain strange and/or amusing phonics words and pictures:

However, this can sometimes backfire, as I discovered a few days ago. In a class of five grade-schoolers, I attempted to teach the difference between the short and long sounds for the letter U ("cut" vs. "cute", for example). One of the words for the short U sound was "duck". However, when I showed the picture to the students, they all immediately burst out with, "AFLAC!", before I could say anything.

^Try as I did, I couldn't get them to say the word "duck" (fortunately, they did understand the difference between the short and long sounds.). Why, you might ask, did they say the name of an American insurance company? Perhaps it has something to do with this:

^ Yes, the Aflac empire has made it all the way across the Pacific! Their building in Nagaoka is only a few minutes away from the school where I work. There are also occasional Aflac commercials on TV, which is undoubtedly where the children picked up the slogan. Here's an example:

^ AF-LAC!

~Oyasumi!