Defense Language Institute instructors recognized for safety campaign Published Aug. 19, 2017 By Ismael Ortega 502nd Air Base Wing Public Affairs JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, Texas -- Five instructors from the Defense Language Institute were presented with Awards of Excellence Aug. 4 at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland for an eternal safety campaign they held in conjunction with their 101 Critical Days of Summer Safety brief. Each week supervisors distributed a section from the 101 Critical Days of Summer Safety brief with a question pertaining to it. Instructors David Britton, Chad Hamilton, Earl Gaston, Carole Franki and Chad Kallauner all answered the most questions correctly over a ten-week period. Along with the certificate, correct answers came with a military rubber duck and “major bragging rights.” “I think it’s a testament to DLI that people took it, and ran with it, and had a lot of fun with it,” said Bethe Lewis, DLI supervisor. “We could have done this in a really straight forward simple way, but we decided to have some fun with it and everybody jumped in and we had amazing support from our leadership and it turned out to be a really fun way to do this.” The military rubber ducks idea originated when Lewis used a similar system when she was teaching a class. She used rubber ducks to motivate her students and award the highest scoring student. With the approval of senior leadership she was able to implement the same system to the general English department’s safety campaign. The contest generated 274 responses from the four general English sections and was well received from the instructors. Next year they hope to spread the military rubber duck safety contest to all the departments. “As long as I’ve been working in safety, which is 35 years, I’ve never seen anything motivating the safety program like this one,” Phillip Brown, 37th Training Wing Chief of Safety said. “What a great way to put life into a serious program.”