The Writing Prompt- Memorable Teacher Names

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When I was growing up, I had some teachers with unfortunate last names.  In junior high I had a math teacher named Mrs. Butte.  She insisted her name was pronounced “Bee-Yute” like the word “beauty,” but she wasn’t attractive at all.  If she had been a hot chick with cleavage, we might have pronounced her name correctly.  But she wasn’t, so we didn’t.

There was also a social studies teacher named Mr. Dick (and his name was pronounced exactly like it was spelled).  Nobody made fun of Mr. Dick.  You would think a guy named Mr. Dick would stay out of teaching because of his last name, but nobody ever made fun of him.

Mr. Dick was an old man who had cool tattoos on his arm (none of the tattoos looked anything like his name).  He had been teaching for decades, and everybody in town had grown up knowing Mr. Dick (or knowing about him), so nobody thought anything about his name anymore.  He was just an old man named Mr. Dick.

There’s no way to prove this, but my junior high school was probably the only one that had a Mrs. Butte and a Mr. Dick.

Then in high school I had an English teacher named Mr. Faggins.  Mr. Faggins announced on the first day of school that his name was to be pronounced as “Fay-guns.”  I knew my rules of pronunciation and how the double consonant causes the vowel in front of it to have the soft sound, but I was also polite enough not to argue with an adult about how to pronounce the adult’s last name.  I’ve always believed that a person should be able to choose how to pronounce his or her name.

Of course, somebody would have to test Mr. Fay-guns…

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This is an excerpt from one of my ebooks  The Writing Prompt .  I wrote it as part of a blog serial a few years ago, converted it to an ebook, and then forgot about it off and on for a while.  Looking back on it, I probably should have promoted it more.

But it brings up an interesting question with summer just starting.   What memorable last names do you remember from school?