Friday, January 17, 2020

I reviewed the rosters for my spring semester classes and one of them has more students with unpronounceable first names than I've ever had in a class of 25. As someone with a name that is routinely misspelled and / or mispronounced, I completely "get" the need to be sensitive. It's common to have some students with unique or unfamiliar names in class, but this list isn't mostly international students, or simply parents choosing clever phonetic spelling or culturally inspired monikers. Something must have been going on twenty years ago. Maybe it was the impact of the millennium or hanging chads or 9/11. Really hoping several save me when I am stumbling over Jxldyrr and Zjnlee by suggesting I call them Jo and Zee.

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