By Praveen Shanbhag
It’s the first day of class in the new school year. You’ve read the names of the kids on your roster. Some of them you know, some are new. Some have easy-to-pronounce names like Jack Smith. Some have names that are a bit more challenging. And you worry about mispronouncing them.
Your students file through the classroom door, eyes and minds wide open to absorb what you have to teach them over the coming year. You run down the attendance list. You nail Jack Smith’s name with confidence. He beams with pride. But you stumble on Avani’s name. You can see her disappointment, despite your honest and caring effort to say it right.
This same situation happens every year in classrooms around the country. Avani’s story is real.
“Avani, pronounced Uv-nee, shared with one of her teachers that no one has ever pronounced her name correctly—since preschool,” says Jason Markey, principal at East Leyden High School in Illinois, where 1,761 student names are spread across 125 teachers, and where more than 32 languages are spoken in its classrooms and students’ homes in a typical year. “This came up during a discussion in class about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on the importance of the creature never being named. Avani didn’t want to trouble anyone by correcting them. [But] she shouldn’t have to.”
Throughout my life, people have mispronounced my name more times than I can count. For me, it never felt like a purposeful slight. Yet, over time, I realized that when people continually mispronounce someone’s name, it sends the unintended message that you are an outsider—an “other.”
“Prolonged mispronunciation of names can lead to the development of anxiety and resentment. This may further lead to an interpretation by the person in question that his/her culture is not valued. When a student goes to school and their name is mispronounced or changed, it can negate the thought, care, and significance of the name, and thus the identity of the student.”
—Rita Kohli and Daniel Solorzano, “Teachers, Please Learn Our Names!: Racial Microagressions and the K-12 Classroom,” Race Ethnicity and Education, 2012.
As our society and classrooms get more diverse, a commitment to inclusion, especially at the start of a child’s educational journey, is crucial. Our names are central to our unique identities, and saying them correctly is the first step in building strong teacher and student relationships that have a lasting impact beyond that first day of school.
NameCoach makes it easy to make that first impression a positive one. Users record their names online so others can easily learn and remember how to say them. Integration with systems like Canvas, D2L, Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai and Jenzabar to extend that first impression beyond the first day of school.
“As teachers, it is our responsibility to learn our students’ names and thus respect their identities and their cultures.”
—Ashley Lauren Samsa, “Respect the ‘Little Q’ in Your Class,” Teaching Tolerance, March 14, 2013.
We know how hard your job is. We’re in your corner. To help you pronounce your students’ names correctly and create a more inclusive environment in your classrooms, we’re offering a free version of our software for use by individual Share My Lessons teachers. To get started, click here and enter the code BACK2SCHOOL when prompted.
To learn more about the inspiration for Name Coach watch the video below.
Praveen Shanbhag is the founder of NameCoach, a software company offering a simple and effective technical solution for the problem of name mispronunciation: Users record their names online so others can easily learn and remember how to pronounce them.
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