Quality English Education!

This morning I had class with my first year students. They're still at a very basic level and are working on self-introductions. They basically just know how to say their name, where they're from and what they like/dislike. To get them to keep practicing the Japanese teacher gets them to do self-introductions for several fictional characters.

Today she used Peter Pan as a model. The students went through the basics "My name is Peter Pan, I'm from never-never land, etc). It was going pretty well, especially when she got to the likes/dislikes part. The kids who had seen the movie quickly started thumbing through the dictionaries to list words like "fairy" and "alligator" that Peter Pan supposedly liked. The teacher then would write all the words on the board so all the kids could see how they were spelled.

Then we got to the dislikes. Everybody knows Peter Pan's nemesis is Captain Hook, so he immediately came to mind for many of the students. The interesting thing about this is that Japanese doesn't have a "hu" sounds; they say "fu" instead. This means that they pronounce "fook" instead of "hook" (can you see where this is headed?). Anyways, the teacher did her duty and wrote "The Captain" up on the board. Then when it came to spell "hook" she quickly sounded out the word and decided to spell it F-U-C-K. So there I was in the middle of English class with the phrase "The Captain Fuck" on the blackboard.

I wasn't able to hide my amusement for very long so the teacher suspected that something was off with the spelling. I quickly corrected it to Hook and the kids were none the wiser. Surprisingly(and thankfully), the teacher didn't ask me what fuck meant after class. I'm guessing she just thinks she created some nonsense words. Anyways, it's incidents like this which are making me understand why they need English language monkeys like me to be in Japanese classrooms...

PS: Today is "Talk like a pirate day". I'm beginning to think that none of this is a coincidence at all...