That moment when you’ve been in your class for three months and your teacher seems to pronounce your name in every way, except the correct way.


Photo: giphy
Photo: giphy



After correcting them time after time, you eventually just roll with it because, well, it’s evident that the instructor has no intentions of doing better.


Make it stop.

Titus-Burgess-Gif
Photo: Tumblr



Your name is YOUR name for a reason. Why not encourage others to get it right?


An educator in the Bronx released a video highlighting the significance of ethnic names and why teachers should aim to correctly pronounce them. Adam Levine-Peres presents three barriers presented when teachers seem uninterested in learning students names. Distrust, quitting and lack of common courtesy. It’s all about effort. He argues the contradiction of requiring students to put forth their best effort when the teacher is not putting forth similar contributions.


He says, “If you don’t know how to say their name, ask them. Ask them, again, and ask them to say it slower. Ask them to say it in their native language and then spell it out phonetically in your attendance sheet.”


According to the YouTube description, Levine-Peres writes, “As an educator that has worked in the classroom, I have witnessed the worst butchering of Latino, Muslim and African-American names. Names hold ancestral importance for many people of color. Our “name” bring with them passion, history & stories. It is sad when I say that students are forced to adopt to an “Americanized” version of their name. We as educators must work hard to pronounce the names of our ethnic students properly, it will go a long way in the classroom.”


Another huge advocate for name pronounciation; Uzo Aduba. In 2014, she shared a noteworthy lesson early on from her Nigerian mother. She told The Improper Bostonian,”Quick lesson: My tribe is Igbo, and you name your kid something that tells your history and hopefully predicts your future. So anyway, in grade school, because my last name started with an A, I was the first in roll call, and nobody ever knew how to pronounce it. So I went home and asked my mother if I could be called Zoe. I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian accent she said, “Why?” I said, “Nobody can pronounce it.” Without missing a beat, she said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”


Photo: tumblr
Photo: tumblr

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