Posted on 09/23/2016 7:02:36 AM PDT by COUNTrecount
A campaign initiated by the National Association for Bilingual Education and the Santa Clara County Office of Education says a teacher who mispronounces a student’s name is causing a negative emotional state that can lead to poor academic success.
The campaign, titled “My Name, My Identity: A Declaration of Self,” says “Did you know that mispronouncing a student’s name negates the identity of the student? This can lead to anxiety and resentment which can hinder academic progress.”
Rita Kohli, an assistant professor of education at the University of California at Riverside, told NEA Today – the publication of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union – that overlooking the mispronunciation of a student’s name is a “microaggression” that can sabotage the learning process.
“Names have incredible significance to families, with so much thought, meaning and culture woven into them,” Kohli says. “When the child enters school and teachers – consciously or not – mispronounce, disregard or change the name, they are in a sense disregarding the family and culture of the students as well.”
Kohli and Daniel Solorzano conducted a study in 2012 called “Teachers, Please Learn Our Names!: Racial Microagressions and the K-12 Classrooms.” They found that mispronouncing students’ names affected their social and emotional state.
“Students often felt shame, embarrassment and that their name was a burden,” Kohli says. “They often began to shy away from their language, culture and families.”
She adds that teachers who mispronounce a student’s name tend to do so because they find it challenging “to center cultures outside of their own.”
Fortunately for most, Kohli cuts some slack for teachers who mispronounce a student’s name on the first attempt.
Meanwhile, education blogger Jennifer Gonzalez refers to the mispronunciation of a student’s name as “a tiny act of bigotry.” She continues:
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Actually, it is a good way to screen callers. If telemarketer calls the house, and says “is Mr or Mrs. Mangled-last-name available”, my wife and I answer, “I’m sorry, but nobody with that name lives here.”
On a similar note, I’ve recently discovered how the family name was actually spelled in Poland. If we still spelled it that way, no one would pronounce it correctly.
Oh good God I personally have an unusual first name of Anglo extraction that is mispronounced I’d say almost 99% of the time by people first meeting me this is been going on my entire life... in fact I have people I’ve known for years that still do not pronounce my name right
Am I to take the whole world is micro aggressing on me?
“Did you know that mispronouncing a student’s name negates the identity of the student?”
Maybe your parents should have thought of that before they named you NyQuil’onda!
Ahh, the same might be said in reverse. You forcing me to adopt your language is a “microagression”.
My Swedish ancestors had to pick new surnames at some point when Sweden got in a big war and started drafting all the villagers. There were just too many “Private Andersons” for the drill instructors to give individual people commands, so they all had to pick new names :)
Exactly. Maybe their mama’s shouldn’t name their illegitimate kids whatever shows up in their alphabet soup.
On Monday, a kid wants to be called one thing and by Friday, it’s something else. Then they decide they’re trans-whatever and changes it again. Enough of this silliness. Just address everyone, “hey, you” and be done with it. When they don’t have names, they won’t have identities that can be oppressed.
I would like to commit macroagressions against the evil pointy-headed communists that invent these irritating tools of social engineering. Microagressions my ass. We should deride and laugh in the faces of anyone using such terms.
Should not be a problem with Muslim male children. They are all Mohammeds.
No one ever gets my German last name right.
Don’t forget...
Atari
Coleco
Nintendo...
Great minds think alike.
I worked with a guy that had a jaw breaker Polish name. Someone called him K-12 one day and it stuck.
or it could motivate them to try even harder to succeed
Having such names is a microaggresion against the rest of society as the mother attempted to make a name that was against the rest of society.
Dindunuffin
My last name is Cather, as in Willa. An old Scotch-Irish surname.
I’m a nurse, too, so you can figure out how it gets pronounced a lot of the time.
“It seems to me”, that we are missing the larger picture here. At least I do know that somewhere along the line, and not so very long ago, the black population made a conscious decision to separate themselves from common white man first names and adopt their own identitfiers. This must have occurred during my blue collar life whilst I was too busy at the grindstone to notice. It is not by accident that an entire people have deliberately chosen to make themselves distinct from we who go by, for the most part “common” first names. I hereby put forth the proposition that these people stop their silly game and step up and declare full on secession from who ever they so desire. This would be logistically tricky, but there is no other solution. It is the only way that the two, never to be reconciled, peoples of the USA can move on together, sharing our mutual bounties. We must move on in parallel lives and forego the notion of living together side by side, in perfect harmony like ivory and ebony.
Mine too. When I first met my husband, 40+ years ago, I took me a week or two to remember how to pronounce it. So, I give folks a break when they can’t say it once :)
Never once have I thought ‘help, I’m being micro-aggressed’.
Depending on class size and what they teach, some teachers have hundreds of students every week. In my community music, art, PE, and Library teachers see between 600 - 800 students each week at the elementary level. Student population in year round schools is around 1000 students. That is a lot of students to have to know their names in the first place, let alone pronounce right every week for fear of committing the dreaded offense of micro aggression. I would like to see the idiots creating new causes for grievances to be put in a position where they have to memorize 1000 names and faces and pronounce the names flawlessly.
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