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 ...
A tough one to pronounce properly for westerners is the Vietnamese surname Nguyen. It could be written Ngwn, as it is one syllable. There is just a hint of the Ng, as though you said “when? while holding your nose. It’s also pronounced in different tones in the north and south.
My last name is one of the most common American names but a student kept forgetting it. He went through a half dozen names and landed on a funny one. After that, most students thought it was my real name and it stuck for years. I didn’t mind.
Nor my Danish first name.
“You people” is also micraggressive, when the people in question are of a “protected” group, like women, Muslims, blacks...
My favorite is the name of a new baby girl:
Female
fem-uh-lee
You huess the ethnicity.
OK - so let them be micro-offended.
How about one from about 55 years ago, when my mother worked in a maternity ward in Pittsburgh:
Female.
Pronounced, “fe mal eh.”
The young (like 15 year old) mother, when asked by my mother what name she had decided upon for her baby (they had been together the day before, and the child-mother was still undecided), said to my mother, “Well, I didn’t need to decide, the night nurse decided for me, and even put her name on this cute little bracelet...lookit!”
So this crap isn’t new.
I swear that I didn’t see your post before adding #88 (IOW, I dindunuffin).
Maybe the one mentioned in my story is the one you met sometime?
Oh, I almost forgot one of my favorite stories.
Back in high school (late ‘70s) we had a black guy in our Western Civ class named Olglesby (last name, I forget his first). For some reason, the teacher couldn’t pronounce it any other way than “Oreo Cookie.” :>)
Thankfully, he and everyone else in the class had a sense of humor. We all regularly got verbally abused by the teacher, and he by us - all for the fun of it. No one came away an emotional wreck, no one felt like they had be “micro-aggressed” (as if that was even a word or a concept!)...IOW, we were normal and having some laughs with a bit of self-deprecating humor.
Damn, I miss those days.
Then I have been microagressed all my life. Virtually no one has pronounced my Polish surname correctly.
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I’m not Polish but have been similarly microagressed.
Polish names are a challenge, especially for those from parts of the country that didn’t get many Polish immigrants. All those consonants, y’s, w’s and z’s are not easy to decipher.
I’m in North Carolina. If I hadn’t heard Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski’s name pronounced countless times, I would never have guessed that it’s pronounced “Shuh-SHEV-ski.” It looks like “Ker-ziz-ZEW-ski.”
Heck, my last name is Costley ... should be easy, right?
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My last name is Agee, Just say the first two letters. I frequently get mail addressed to “The Agree family”.
Of course it doesn’t apply to those of us who have Polish last names, that lack a certain number of vowels.
LOL, I’ve never seen that. Funny.
I had a sergeant with a very long name that began with “A”
Nobody could pronounce his name and if you could, it would take to long.
So we called him Sgt. Alphabet.
It had almost every letter in the alphabet.
I think my favorite was a name I heard in Oklahoma of a native American.
Apparently, he was very good a tackling because every time he made a tackle, the announcer said “Tackle made by BuffaloMeat”
That was his last name.
This country needs to get rid of these snoflakes.
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