The Name Game

Karma has not been kind to me with respect to the names I have had to learn as a teacher. I am not good with names. I have to make a real effort to learn people’s names.

No, it’s not what you’re thinking. It’s not the difficult to pronounce names that I stumble on, it’s similarity of names that throws me off. And it’s not that I mix up students; that’s never a problem. The problem for me is when I need to recall the name and say it correctly very quickly. 

I know I’m not alone in this. I have a friend with nine children. When she was trying to call a kid downstairs to go to school, she would basically start calling off names of oldest to youngest and stop when she hit the right one. It’s not that she didn’t know her kid’s names, but in the heat of the moment, the mind sometimes does funny things with one's recall.

When I was a substitute, I had a class with three students named Destiny. “What’s the big deal?” you may be thinking, and you’d be justified in thinking that. The part that confused me is that the three students spelled it three different ways: 

Destiny, 

Destinee, 

Destineey.

I started thinking in my head Destiny with one E, Destiny with no Y, Destiny with three E’s and a Y. Let’s face it, that’s a lot to recall in a hurry.

When I taught at the Hellenic American Academy, I had two students whose names it took me a while to get comfortable:

Efthamia

Efthalia

I never mixed up the differences between the students - and they were very different people - but sometimes I’d get a little tongue-tied when calling out their names and it would come out as Eftha,mumblemumble,ia. In which case, Efthamia would answer because Efthalia was often daydreaming.

And then last year at McAuliffe I had two students with very similar names that I mixed up for a little while:

Maria Julia

Julia Maria

I solved this by just using their first names and that seemed to help.  

And, now we come to this year. I've got multiples. I've got multiple students with the same names in class and I've got twins. 

Don't get me started on the twins, I'm confused enough already...