If you were to present your example as if it were an explanation of the Coriolis force, you are now stuck with its inability to handle the behavior of a missile as it goes similarly off track after being fired in an easterly or westerly direction. They will take your description of the elephant's leg and assume that the whole beast is topographically equivalent to a tree trunk. Of course, students can be forgiven for failing to understand the difference between an example and an explanation, because so many teachers also fail to understand the distinction. Thus, I note that there is a much bigger difference in the underlying easterly component of the earth's velocity as one goes from the north side of a hurricane to its south side than there is if one goes from the north side of a sink to its south side. Yet, on you page, you stress that the differences in behavior result from differences in time, not space.
Explanations are funny things.
The implication is that if one were to match the velocity differences on the two scales, then the Coriolis force, or maybe the displacement, would suddenly be the same in each case. The traditional response to what you have suggested is that you have confused two things, a spatial scale and temporal scale. There is much to commend this approach. But, when one puts the expression in terms of the velocity difference across the region, other variables pop up, and one discovers that such an approach moves one further away from a simple understanding what is going on, rather than closer to it. So, I recommend that in your class, you not use the argument about the latitudinal variation of the Earth's tangential velocity.