yesterday, i got the long-awaited opportunity to name a new student. as you may know, korean students, like many asians with difficult-for-westerners-to-understand-names, do us the favour of adopting english names to make our lives significantly easier. they usually obtain these early in their school years (sometimes kindergarten, or grade one, or two) and can carry them on for potentially the rest of their "english" lives. nevertheless, i was excited about being given the honour of finding this nameless boy his new moniker.
the popularity of boring old-fashioned names at our hagwon is apparent. you'd never find so many under-12-year-olds with the names lucy, sally, harry, judy, tom, jim, jimmy, bill, etcetera at home. i'm not sure why they gravitate towards these names, but i refused to let it happen on my watch!
as my new student was a 6th grade boy, my strategy was to select ten names that met my approval and write them on the board and allow him to pick his favourite. i chose names that i liked, or potentially would consider for a child of my own (ahem, future child!), and male friends names. and of course, i threw in the name "mark" just in case. there was no "bill", "tom", or "harry" to choose. sadly, there was also no "superman", "batman", or "optimus prime" - maybe i'm too rudimentary, but i don't think i could subject a child to potentially bearing a superhero status for a possible lifetime.
in the end, he chose "paul," which i suppose could also be considered old-fashioned and boring. but i kinda like it. and, in the end, if he ends up being a hellion and ruining that name for me forever, it wasn't near the top of my baby name list anyway.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment