Challenges in Teaching: Getting Students To Pronounce My Name Correctly

When I stepped into the classroom as a first-year teacher in 1989, I knew that my students would have a tough time pronouncing my last name.  Public school teachers had always messed it up (unless they’d taught my older brothers years earlier), so I didn’t expect eighth graders to do any better.

My last name is pronounced ‘Shek” but is spelled in a way that doesn’t look anything like that, and through all my years as a student, teachers did a great job mangling it, especially on the first day of school.  I won’t get into all the mispronunciations, but supposedly the correct pronunciation of my last name is ‘Shek.’  That’s the way I was taught.  I wouldn’t be surprised if that turns out to be wrong, though.  So much of what I learned at a young age has turned out to be false that I wouldn’t be shocked if the correct pronunciation of my last name turned out to be something like ‘Skork.’

Of course, my first year of teaching was a borderline disaster, but it wasn’t because of my last name.  I don’t even remember my students doing anything wrong with it.  They probably did, but mispronunciation of my last name was the least of my worries that year.

Anyway, in the early 1990s, Shaquille O’Neil became a famous basketball player, so my students called me Mr. Shaq, and I went with it.  At least the mispronunciation was in reference to a popular athlete.  I took it as a compliment. Then in the early 2000s, the movie Shrek was released.  

The good news was that Shrek made it very easy to teach students how to pronounce my name correctly: it’s ‘Shrek’ without the ‘r.’  The bad news was that students loved calling me Mr. Shrek.  A little patience and a few bathroom denials at the beginning of every school year solved that problem.  Still, if I ever go back into teaching, I think I’ll just have my students call me Mr. James.

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Below is the first episode of  a blog serial that I wrote in 2012 called “Long Story.”  The first episode deals with teachers who had unusual names. Some of those last names were much worse than mine.

LONG STORY: TEACHERS WITH FUNNY LAST NAMES

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.  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. 

Continue reading at Long Story: Teachers with Funny Last Names .

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Here’s my ONE novel… A grammar-obsessed English teacher falls in ‘luuuvvv’ but discovers how chaotic and dangerous ‘luuuvvv’ can be.

Or you can buy a copy here on Amazon!

Not sure? Read a sample chapter of The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy.