On Teaching

Some people like to either give their students, or allow their students to pick English names. I think this is a bad idea for the following three reasons.

One: They'll expect you to remember their names. I have almost two thousand students, the most I see them is once a week.

Two: You'll have two hundred 'Harry Potters' and another hundred assorted names.

Three: They types of names that have cropped up in a guy I knows' class include; Adolf Hitler, Rapist, SEXOR, etc. While amusing to hear a ten to seventeen year old say some of these things, it still isn't worth remembering them all.

A girl I know said something about bringing up their colonialist past when the Japanese would assign new names to people in places and how she didn't want to be seen as an outsider who came and reopened all those old wounds. Me, I doubt that my students would have any clue about any of that.