What do you think Coontz’s
claim/thesis is?Find a passage from the
text that summarizes her claim.
Evidence:
3. What evidence does Coontz provide for her claim?
Application
4.Can you think of
examples from your own life that support Coontz’s thesis?If you can’t think of examples that apply
directly to you, perhaps you can think of examples that apply to siblings,
relatives, or friends?
We read an excerpt from sociologist Stephanie Coontz called "Parent-Teen Conflicts." Hopefully the article helped you see that the idea of a "teenager" is a social construction. The idea of a teenager has only been around since the 1940s. Before that, individuals went more from childhood to adulthood very quickly. Now, the process of childhood has a long drawn out middle period. This encompasses the "teenage years" but it also includes what sociologists call "young adulthood." Sociologists estimate the average age of independence in the United States to be 27. That is when (on average) individuals can be self-sustaining financially and emotionally and socially enough to have a family and residence of their own. So this leaves a long middle period between the age of puberty (10) and independence (27). And throughout that time, there are many mixed messages being given to young adults. This results in "rolelessness," or a feeling of not knowing what is expected of you during those years. One example was the lack of meaningful work. Teens generally have jobs that society deems as unworthy or meaningless. This can leave teens feeling like they don't matter. Can you see how Coontz makes that point? Do you see how that can be true? Can you see how being a "teenager" is a social construction?
What are some of the ways teens feel when dealing with adults and expectations whether it's parents, school, work, laws or rules? How are these feelings a social construct?
And this follow-up from Contexts about research showing different routes to adulthood depending on one's race, social class and other factors.
As you enter, please take out your gold Framework guide and read this post:
We have been talking about a how sociologists view the world. Another way to understand how to have a sociological perspective is through what C. Wright Mills calls a "sociological imagination". Mills described the sociological imagination as the "connection of biography to history". Biography is who a person is. History is when and where you live. So, a sociological imagination is the understanding that people are shaped by when and where they live.
One example of sociological imagination is through the Beloit Mindset list. Every year, Beloit College publishes a list of how the current year's freshmen will experience and have experienced the world differently.
Click on the link above and think about how your world is different than the one in which your parents grew up.
Data/example: How is this an example of the sociological imagination?
Both show that being born in a different time means students will experience the world differently. This might sound obvious, but there is a tendency for people to think that they are simply who they are regardless of time or place.
Conclusions and inquiry: How might kids being born today experience the world differently than you have? Or, how might kids being born in 2013 be influenced differently than you have? And yet another way to think about this is, how might you have been different if you grew up somewhere else? Especially for those of you who have moved, try to imagine what your life would be if you still lived somewhere else.
Another example is this video of a child who is trying to use a magazine like an ipad:
This is a great post from the Everyday Sociology site that explainshow a sociological imagination can be used to analyze how individuals are affected by where they live. Student Notes:
What is a sociological imagination?
What does it mean to be the intersection of history and biography?
What is does SI have to do with personal troubles and public issues?
Refer to Ferris & Stein (textbook) pgs. 9-13, 17 for more info.
What do you think the most important qualities would be for someone working at Google?
It might surprise you to find out what the qualities are that Google now looks for in it's managers and leaders. And the cool part about it is that Google hired researchers with a background in social science (sociology) to help them improve.
"...the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, empathy, and emotional intelligence. And topping the list: emotional safety. No bullying. To succeed, each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes. They must know they are being heard."
My class will demand that you exhibit these skills that researchers identified. It will demand that you are active. You cannot hide quietly in class and you cannot rely on a test to pass the class.
Stanley Lieberson was a respected sociologist from Harvard who studied trends and fashions.He used the Social Security Names database to study how names spread in popularity.His research is an example of how the social institution of family creates stability.The naming of new babies is not simply personal; families influence each other.Read this NY Times[iii] article about Lieberson then try your own research with the data.
WHATEVER happened to Lisa, Mary, Karen, Susan and Kimberly?
On top in the 1960's, they've been shoved aside by Emily, Madison, Hannah, Ashley and Alexis. Those were the most popular names for American girls born in 2001, according to data released last week by the Social Security Administration.
As for Michael, David, John, James and Robert -- the top five for boys in the 1960's -- only Michael remains. The others have been replaced by Jacob, Matthew, Joshua, and Christopher. (The lists are at www.ssa .gov/OACT/babynames.)
Nobody runs ads to persuade parents to choose Emily or Joshua for their newborns. No magazine editors dictate that Ryan is the new Michael.
But names still shift according to fashion. Once-popular names seem tired and out of date, new ones exciting. Old-fashioned names, like Emily, take on the allure of vintage clothing. Style revivals happen in names, too.
Contrary to what many critics of markets believe (and many fashion industry executives wish), fashion isn't a predictable commercial phenomenon driven by manipulation and advertising. Fashion -- the process by which form seems exhausted and then refreshed, without regard to functional improvements -- exists even in completely noncommercial ''markets.''
In ''A Matter of Taste'' (Yale University Press, 2000), Stanley Lieberson, a Harvard sociologist, analyzes how tastes in names shift. In the process, he sheds light on how fashion works.
Economists usually assume that tastes don't change. To explain shifts in demand, they look for changing relative prices. That approach imposes disciplinary rigor -- ''tastes changed'' could too easily explain just about anything -- but it makes accounting for fashion hard.
Professor Lieberson offers an explanation even an economist can accept. The taste for names or sounds may change, but those changes reflect underlying preferences for novelty, conformity and divergence.
Name choices, like clothing choices, reflect the desire to be different, but not too different. The ideal balance varies, and new fashions begin with innovators who want to stand out. If the innovations have the right aesthetic appeal, they spread to people who aren't as nonconformist.
''There must have been some people starting off with Madison,'' Professor Lieberson said in an interview. ''That type of person is no longer naming their kid Madison.''
Parents who today pick Madison for their daughter's name, he said, ''would not have given the same name, the same sounds, earlier because it was a weird name.''
Indeed, Madison didn't show up on the lists until the 1980's, when it was the decade's 539th most popular name. Three of last year's top 20 girls' names -- Madison (No. 2), Taylor (No. 12), and Brianna (No. 18) -- weren't in the top 1,000 in the 1960's. (Taylor was 865th for boys.)
Like designers who experiment with new ideas, parents have to choose babies' names without knowing exactly what other parents are choosing. The result is a complex, often surprising, dynamic.
Parents frequently find that the name they ''just liked'' is suddenly common, expressing aesthetic preferences. Professor Lieberson became interested in names after he and his wife named their first daughter Rebecca, only to find there were little Beckys everywhere.
Like hemlines, names don't bounce around randomly. Newly popular names tend to build on what has gone before, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of certain styles. ''People are in effect branching off an existing set of tastes,'' Professor Lieberson says.
Beginning in the late 1960's, for instance, names beginning with La became popular for African-American girls. The first to hit the top 50, Latonya, was a play on the existing name Tonya. Latanya and Latasha similarly built on older names. ''But then the La's developed a life of their own,'' Professor Lieberson notes, leading to brand-new names like Latoya and Latrice.
Although some ethnic names remain distinctive, those differences tend to dissipate over time. Today's list of top boys' names shows the influence of Latino immigrants -- Jose is No. 30, Luis No. 44, Carlos No. 55, Jesus No. 66 -- and the 1960's list reflects earlier Irish and Italian immigrants (and the influence of Catholic saints' names more generally). Over a relatively short period, however, immigrant families begin to select names from the general pool.
Professor Lieberson cites data from Illinois matching mothers' ethnicity with popular names. From 1985 to 1988, Jose was the fifth-most-popular boys' name among Mexican-American mothers. But it followed Michael, Daniel, David and Anthony.
Contrary to common assumptions about how fashion works, names don't simply trickle down from high-income, well-educated parents to lower-income, less-educated parents. Newly popular names tend to catch on with everyone at about the same time, and they spread both up and down.
Whether names or clothes, fashion reflects the primacy of individual taste over inherited custom. The freer people feel to choose names they like, rather than names of relatives or saints, the faster names go through cycles. Boys' names, which tend to be more influenced by custom, change slower.
The turnover, Professor Lieberson says, ''is much faster now than it used to be,'' and a smaller proportion of all names are concentrated among the most popular. So there's a constant need for new names, as formerly unusual ones become too common.
''It will become apparent in a few years that there are tons of Madisons, and people will act accordingly,'' he says.
Maybe Saige (No. 939) or Ximena (No. 894) will be the next Madison. Or maybe Virginia, No. 391 today but No. 7 in the 1920's, is due for a revival.
(S1) 2.1What are some of the claims that Lieberson made?What was his reasoning?
(S2) 2.2 Choose one of his claims and see if you can find data to support it.Explain your findings below.
(S2) 2.3 Now search the database for a different patterns. Try to identify at least one pattern. Some ideas you might consider: choose a name and analyze it over time, can compare different years, compare different genders, etc...Explain your findings and the supporting data below.
As your classmates enter the room, please take out your iPad and do the following: 1. Please change the title of the google doc that you shared with me to: Last Name, First Name Period
2. Please begin reading the following passage: Names, like people, seem individual and unique.For
example, when someone calls your name, you probably look up automatically and
assume they are talking about you.And,
indeed, for many of us, we are the only person who we know with our exact
name.I don’t know anyone named Chris
Salituro other than myself.However,
names are not a unique trait unto ourselves.Instead, names are our first connection to community.Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of South Africa
once said “A solitary individual is not possible.We come into being because a community of
people came together.”That community of
people gives you a name and sees to it that you survive.We would not be alive if it wasn’t for their
influence and nurture.So, names are a
great way to examine how sociologists look at the world.Many aspects of our lives that seem like individual
choices or individual traits are actually guided by social forces that are
larger than us.Our families, schools,
religions, governments and other social institutions all influence who we are,
including in ways that we don’t even realize.The sociological perspective examines these influences from different
perspectives.
Structural-Functional Perspective
The first perspective we will
consider is the structural functional perspective.This perspective was created by Emile
Durkheim who said societies have a structure made up of different systems that
function to keep order in society.Just
like a body has different systems such as respiratory, circulatory, digestive
and nervous, a society has different systems like family, educational,
religious, governmental etc…These
systems keep order in society. Take a look at the handout (passed out in class) I created called, A Framework for Introduction to Sociology.
Names can function to connect people to religion or family members.
Names can function impart morals and values.
Names can function to transmit cultural preferences and popular ideas.
As you read the passages in
italics below, think about these:What
function does a name serve for family?What role does family play?
The story behind every
student’s name is a 100% personalized one. Sometimes it’s a simple story (e.g.
named after a TV character their mother adored) and sometimes it’s a complex
Rube Goldberg like series of events that lead to their naming. Regardless of how
their parents came to their name, the students present their naming as a
completely individual choice made by their parents2. No one ever says, “Lindsey was really popular
at the time of my birth and my parents just wanted to fit in”
To hear students tell it the child naming process is unique from
one family to the next. They seem to have perceived their relationship with
their parents as one of a kind and wholly removed from the larger society. This
is exactly why using child naming as an example of culture and social forces.
Research by Stanley Lieberson in the book A Matter of Taste (summarized well in
this NYT
article) suggests that parents balance the desire to have a unique
name for their child with the desire to not have a name that is wildly
divergent from the rest of children in their culture. Most parents wouldn’t
name there child alkdjfsoic. However, parents want their child to be recognized
as special or as a unique human being, so they also don’t want to name their
child something too generic or too common.
What emerges from this naming process is a trend. Many names go
in and out of fashion; trending up in popularity and then back down. An easy
way of illustrating this to your students is to use the US Social Security Administration’s
“Popular Baby Names” database. This easy to use website allows you
to search any name and see how it ranks against the 1000 most popular baby
names. For most students their names go from out of fashion in the decades
before their birth, then they become popular right around their birth, and then
fall out of popularity again.
Choosing a name for a
child is complicated. Not only should it sound right with the family name but
future nicknames - good and bad - need to be taken into consideration. A name
might honour a favourite grandparent, but it will also have a forgotten meaning
to be unearthed in books, and dubious modern associations to be checked on
Google.
Dalton Conley and his
wife, Natalie Jeremijenko, were halfway through this pleasant but painstaking
process when their baby girl was born, two months premature.
"We had narrowed
down the selections to a bunch of E- names, but we couldn't ultimately
decide," says Conley, who lives in New York. "Then we came up with
the idea of, 'Let's just constrain the first degree of freedom. Let's just give
her the first letter and then she can decide when she's old enough what it
stands for.'"
And so, E was born. Now
16, she hasn't yet felt the need to extend her first name. "I think once
you're given a name, you get used to it - it's part of you," she says. E's
little brother, meanwhile, Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser
Knuckles, did take up his parents' offer to change his name. He added the Heyno
and Knuckles when he was four, and his parents made the changes official.
"I have been called
a child abuser online," says Dalton Conley, the author of Parentology:
Everything You Wanted to Know about the Science of Raising Children but Were
Too Exhausted to Ask. "I don't think I've saddled them with some horrible
burden. They like the fact that they have unique names now."
Over the last 70 years,
researchers have tried to gauge the effect on an individual of having an
unusual name. It is thought that our identity is partly shaped by the way we
are treated by other people - a concept psychologists call the
"looking-glass self" - and our name has the potential to colour our
interactions with society. Early studies found that men with uncommon first
names were more likely to drop out of school and be lonely later in life. One
study found that psychiatric patients with more unusual names tended to be more
disturbed.
But more recent work has
presented a mixed picture. Richard Zweigenhaft, a psychologist at Guilford
College in the US, pointed out that wealthy, oddly-named Americans are more
likely to find themselves in Who's Who. He found no consistent bad effects of having
a strange name, but noted that both common and unusual names are sometimes
deemed desirable.
Conley, who is a
sociologist at New York University, says that children with unusual names may
learn impulse control because they may be teased or get used to people asking
about their names. "They actually benefit from that experience by learning
to control their emotions or their impulses, which is of course a great skill
for success."
But for the main part, he
says, the effect of a name on its bearer rarely amounts to more than the effect
of being raised by parents who would choose such a name.
A similar conclusion is
reached by Gregory Clark, the economist behind the book The Son Also Rises:
Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Although the main focus of his
research is family names, Clark has looked at first names too - specifically,
the names of 14,449 freshmen students attending the elite University of Oxford
between 2008-2013. By contrasting the incidence of first names in the Oxford
sample with their incidence among the general population (of the same age), he
calculated the probability, relative to average, that a person given a
particular name would go to Oxford. (For the purposes of his research he
excluded students with non-English or Welsh surnames.)
He notes that there are
more than three times as many Eleanors at Oxford than we might expect, given
the frequency of that first name among girls in the general population, and
Peters, Simons and Annas are not far behind. Conversely, there is less than a
30th of the expected number of Jades and an even smaller proportion of Paiges
and Shannons. An Eleanor is 100 times more likely to go to Oxford than a Jade.
However, there is no evidence that it's the names causing such a
marked discrepancy, rather than other factors they represent, Clark says.
Different names are popular among different social classes, and these groups
have different opportunities and goals. "That's something that's emerged
in modern England that didn't exist around 1800," he says. When he re-ran
his study, but this time looking at students attending Oxford and Cambridge in
the early 19th Century, he found the correlation between names and university
attendance far less marked. First names simply weren't the social signifiers
they are now.
What's happened since then is a move towards
unusual, even unique, names. Before 1800, Clark says, four first names referred
to half of all English men. In 2012, according to the Office for National
Statistics, the top four names (Harry, Oliver, Jack, Charlie) accounted for
just 7% of English baby boys (and the picture was much the same in Wales).
Similarly in the US, in 1950, 5% of US parents
chose a name for their child that wasn't in the top 1,000 names. In 2012, that figure was up to 27%.
As late as the 18th Century, it wasn't uncommon for parents to call multiple children the
same name - two Johns for different grandfathers, for example. Now parents
increasingly look for unique names or spellings of names. As Jean Twenge points
out in her book the Narcissism Epidemic, Jasmine now rubs shoulders in naming
lists with Jazmine, Jazmyne, Jazzmin, Jazzmine, Jasmina, Jazmyn, Jasmin, and
Jasmyn.
As baby names become a matter of choice rather
than tradition, they reveal more about the people doing the choosing. An
example of this is the growing ease with which one can guess whether a person
in the US is black or white. Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt point out that in
California in the years running up to 2003, around 40% of black girls were
given names that weren't bestowed on a single white girl in the state.
(S1)
1.1 What functions do names serve for families?How do families use names to raise children?How does this maintain stability within
society?Use data from the reading above
to provide evidence to support your claim.
(S3)
1.2What are the reasons you or your
classmates stated for why your are named what you are?How are these reasons an example of social
institutions creating stability and order within society?
Stanley
Lieberson was a respected sociologist from Harvard who studied trends and
fashions.He used the Social Security
Names database to study how names spread in popularity.His research is an example of how the social
institution of family creates stability.The naming of new babies is not simply personal; families influence each
other.Read this
NY Times[iii] article about Lieberson
then try your own research with the data.
WHATEVER
happened to Lisa, Mary, Karen, Susan and Kimberly?
On
top in the 1960's, they've been shoved aside by Emily, Madison, Hannah, Ashley
and Alexis. Those were the most popular names for American girls born in 2001,
according to data released last week by the Social Security Administration.
As
for Michael, David, John, James and Robert -- the top five for boys in the
1960's -- only Michael remains. The others have been replaced by Jacob,
Matthew, Joshua, and Christopher. (The lists are at www.ssa
.gov/OACT/babynames.)
Nobody
runs ads to persuade parents to choose Emily or Joshua for their newborns. No
magazine editors dictate that Ryan is the new Michael.
But
names still shift according to fashion. Once-popular names seem tired and out
of date, new ones exciting. Old-fashioned names, like Emily, take on the allure
of vintage clothing. Style revivals happen in names, too.
Contrary
to what many critics of markets believe (and many fashion industry executives
wish), fashion isn't a predictable commercial phenomenon driven by manipulation
and advertising. Fashion -- the process by which form seems exhausted and then
refreshed, without regard to functional improvements -- exists even in
completely noncommercial ''markets.''
In
''A Matter of Taste'' (Yale University Press, 2000), Stanley Lieberson, a
Harvard sociologist, analyzes how tastes in names shift. In the process, he
sheds light on how fashion works.
Economists
usually assume that tastes don't change. To explain shifts in demand, they look
for changing relative prices. That approach imposes disciplinary rigor --
''tastes changed'' could too easily explain just about anything -- but it makes
accounting for fashion hard.
Professor
Lieberson offers an explanation even an economist can accept. The taste for
names or sounds may change, but those changes reflect underlying preferences
for novelty, conformity and divergence.
Name
choices, like clothing choices, reflect the desire to be different, but not too
different. The ideal balance varies, and new fashions begin with innovators who
want to stand out. If the innovations have the right aesthetic appeal, they
spread to people who aren't as nonconformist.
''There
must have been some people starting off with Madison,'' Professor Lieberson
said in an interview. ''That type of person is no longer naming their kid
Madison.''
Parents
who today pick Madison for their daughter's name, he said, ''would not have
given the same name, the same sounds, earlier because it was a weird name.''
Indeed,
Madison didn't show up on the lists until the 1980's, when it was the decade's
539th most popular name. Three of last year's top 20 girls' names -- Madison
(No. 2), Taylor (No. 12), and Brianna (No. 18) -- weren't in the top 1,000 in
the 1960's. (Taylor was 865th for boys.)
Like
designers who experiment with new ideas, parents have to choose babies' names
without knowing exactly what other parents are choosing. The result is a
complex, often surprising, dynamic.
Parents
frequently find that the name they ''just liked'' is suddenly common,
expressing aesthetic preferences. Professor Lieberson became interested in
names after he and his wife named their first daughter Rebecca, only to find
there were little Beckys everywhere.
Like
hemlines, names don't bounce around randomly. Newly popular names tend to build
on what has gone before, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of certain
styles. ''People are in effect branching off an existing set of tastes,''
Professor Lieberson says.
Beginning
in the late 1960's, for instance, names beginning with La became popular for
African-American girls. The first to hit the top 50, Latonya, was a play on the
existing name Tonya. Latanya and Latasha similarly built on older names. ''But
then the La's developed a life of their own,'' Professor Lieberson notes,
leading to brand-new names like Latoya and Latrice.
Although
some ethnic names remain distinctive, those differences tend to dissipate over
time. Today's list of top boys' names shows the influence of Latino immigrants
-- Jose is No. 30, Luis No. 44, Carlos No. 55, Jesus No. 66 -- and the 1960's
list reflects earlier Irish and Italian immigrants (and the influence of
Catholic saints' names more generally). Over a relatively short period,
however, immigrant families begin to select names from the general pool.
Professor
Lieberson cites data from Illinois matching mothers' ethnicity with popular
names. From 1985 to 1988, Jose was the fifth-most-popular boys' name among
Mexican-American mothers. But it followed Michael, Daniel, David and Anthony.
Contrary
to common assumptions about how fashion works, names don't simply trickle down
from high-income, well-educated parents to lower-income, less-educated parents.
Newly popular names tend to catch on with everyone at about the same time, and
they spread both up and down.
Whether
names or clothes, fashion reflects the primacy of individual taste over
inherited custom. The freer people feel to choose names they like, rather than
names of relatives or saints, the faster names go through cycles. Boys' names,
which tend to be more influenced by custom, change slower.
The
turnover, Professor Lieberson says, ''is much faster now than it used to be,''
and a smaller proportion of all names are concentrated among the most popular.
So there's a constant need for new names, as formerly unusual ones become too
common.
''It
will become apparent in a few years that there are tons of Madisons, and people
will act accordingly,'' he says.
Maybe
Saige (No. 939) or Ximena (No. 894) will be the next Madison. Or maybe
Virginia, No. 391 today but No. 7 in the 1920's, is due for a revival.
(S1)
2.1What are some of the claims that
Lieberson made?What was his reasoning?
(S2) 2.2 Choose one
of his claims and see if you can find data to support it.Explain your findings below.
(S2) 2.3 Now search the database for a different
patterns. Try to identify at least one pattern. Some ideas you
might consider: choose a name and analyze it over time, can compare
different years, compare different genders, etc...Explain your findings and the supporting data
below.
All of the above is an example of how functional
sociologists view society and how order and stability are maintained.However, sometimes institutions are out of
balance and they create disorder.This
is a state of dysfunction.Read the following
and look for how studying names might show dysfunction in society?
When people come across Michelle-Thuy Ngoc Duong’s name,
they often see a stumbling block bound to trip up their tongues. The
17-year-old sees a bridge, one that spans her parents’ journey from
Vietnam to the United States. It’s a bridge connecting the U.S.-born teen
to Vietnamese culture, a bridge to understanding.
“My name is where I come from,” Michelle-Thuy Ngoc said.
“It’s a reminder of hope.”
A junior at Downtown College Prep
Alum Rock High School, a San Jose, California-based charter school,
Michelle-Thuy Ngoc (pronounced ‘knock twee’) is among the students
backing “My Name, My Identity,”a national campaign that
places a premium on pronouncing students’ names correctly and valuing
diversity.
The campaign—a partnership
between the National Association for Bilingual Education,
the Santa Clara, California, County Office of Education, and the California
Association for Bilingual Education—focuses on the fact that a name is more
than just a name: It’s one of the first things children recognize, one of the
first words they learn to say, it’s how the world identifies them.
For students, especially the children of immigrants or
those who are English-language learners, a teacher who knows their name and can
pronounce it correctly signals respect and marks a critical step in helping
them adjust to school.
But for many ELLs, a mispronounced name is often the first
of many slights they experience in classrooms; they’re already unlikely to see
educators who are like them, teachers who speak their language, or a curriculum
that reflects their culture.
“If they’re encountering teachers who
are not taking the time to learn their name or don’t validate who they are, it
starts to create this wall,” said Rita (‘ree-the’) Kohli, an assistant professor in
the graduate school of education at the University of California,
Riverside.
“If they’re encountering teachers who are not taking the time to
learn their name or don’t validate who they are, it starts to create this
wall.” — Rita Kohli, assistant professor at UC Riverside
It can also hinder academic progress.
A divide already exists between many English learners and
immigrant students and their native English speaking peers. Despite a national
increase in the overall graduation rate, the dropout rate for foreign-born and
immigrant students remains above 30 percent, three times that of U.S.-born
white students.
Before transitioning into K-12
administration, Santa Clara County Superintendent Jon Gundry taught middle and high school
English as a second language classes for 16 years. Many of his students were
newcomer English learners and he made it a priority to learn the proper
pronunciation of each student’s name on the first day of class.
“I was their first connection to a new culture, a new
country,” Gundry said. “As a teacher, I felt that if I didn’t make an effort to
pronounce their name correctly, it showed I didn’t care about who they were.”
Rendered
Invisible
Effort is the biggest obstacle to learning how to
correctly pronounce a person’s name; teachers have to want to do it, said
Jennifer Gonzalez, a former teacher and author of the education blog Cult of
Pedagogy. To even suggest that a child’s name is difficult to pronounce is
problematic, she said.
“Even the word ‘difficult’ is a pretty loaded word,”
Gonzalez said. “It’s only difficult because it’s culturally different.”
As a kindergarten student in 1950s Brooklyn, Carmen
Fariña, a native-Spanish speaker, had a teacher who marked her absent every day
for weeks because she didn’t raise her hand during roll call. The teacher
assumed Fariña was being defiant, but the future New York City schools
chancellor never heard her name called; the teacher had repeatedly failed to
pronounce it correctly, including rolling the r’s.
“Mispronouncing a student’s name essentially renders that
student invisible,” Fariña said during a keynote address at the National
Association for Bilingual Education annual conference in March.
Kohli produced a study with Daniel Solórzano, a professor of education and
Chicano studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, on
microaggressions, the subtle slights that are painfully obvious and hurtful to
the person receiving them, but unintended and unnoticed by the person saying
them. The work, “Teachers Please Learn Our Names! Racial Microaggressions and the
K-12 Classroom,” is littered with stories of students who
endured shame, anxiety, or embarrassment, and sometimes a mix of all three,
when their names were called in class.
There’s the tale of a Portland, Oregon-area student with a
traditional Chinese name who had her name garbled by a vice principal during an
honors ceremony. Set to present the student with an award, the principal
laughed at his mistake, drawing chuckles from the audience.
To avoid embarrassment, the student slumped in her seat,
refusing to rise to receive the prestigious award. She later skipped her
graduation.
The mispronunciation wasn’t an isolated event. Having
endured years of slights, she felt the need to become invisible long before the
principal’s laughter marked the tipping point.
The woman, who went on to become an educator, changed her
first name to ‘Anita.’
“If someone mispronounces your name once as a high school
student, you might correct them,” said Kohli, whose parents immigrated to the
United States from India. “But if this has been your entire existence in
education, what do you do?”
Kohli’s own brother had a teacher mispronounce his
traditional South Asian name, Sharad (‘shu-rudth’) as Sharub during a ninth
grade class. The teacher and the students decided it was easier to call him
Shrub, and it stuck for the rest of high school. The nickname forced him to
check part of his identity at the door.
Michelle-Thuy Ngoc didn’t always embrace her full name,
figuring that it would make other people uncomfortable. For years, she ignored
the Vietnamese half of her first name, simply going by Michelle. The order in
which Vietnamese names are spoken differs from English.
“I came to accept [my full name] over time,” she said.
Building
Bridges
If students have teachers who share their cultural
backgrounds, they’re more likely to hear their names pronounced correctly. But
while the diversity of the nation’s public school student body has exploded in
the last few decades, the number of African-American, Latino, and Asian
teachers hasn’t kept pace.
Gonzalez, a former teacher in school districts in Kentucky
and Maryland, said she often observed a ‘these people’ attitude from her mostly
white female colleagues.
“They approached it like, ‘It’s your fault for having a
weird name,'” Gonzalez said.
To some degree, Gonzalez understands the struggle students
face. She grew up with a Russian surname, Yurkosky, that befuddled teachers and
classmates. She said it rhymes with “her-pots-ski,” minus the “t” sound in pots.
“But I did not experience all the other stuff and other
ways that a person can feel discriminated against,” said Gonzalez, who is
white.
Kohli, a former Oakland Unified School District teacher,
recommends that K-12 educators identify and expand their cultural limits and
recognize the influence they wield over a student’s sense of self. While
frustration or confusion may seem like a natural response when a teacher faces
an unfamiliar name, it can leave a “lasting impact on the way that child sees
themselves and their culture,” the study’s authors argue.
Butchered names are not just a problem for English
learners and immigrants; students from a number of cultural backgrounds have
their names garbled or ridiculed. Hawaiian and African-American students, with
names that link to their ancestry, also shared stories of how constant
mispronunciations made them feel uncomfortable with their names.
Mocking
Names?
In an extreme case, a teacher in Wayne Township, New
Jersey, lost her tenure status and job in 2015 for mocking a student’s name on
Facebook. Several letters in the student’s name spelled out a profane word,
legal documents show.
More often, the mocking is more direct and reflexive:
laughing off pronunciation, asking the student to take on a nickname, or making
a spectacle of their name, Kohli said.
“It matters what you do when you’re in front of a child
and struggling with their name,” Kohli said. “Is it framed as my inability to
say someone’s name or is it framed as the student doing something to make your
life more difficult?”
Michelle-Thuy Ngoc attends Downtown
College Prep, a 210-student high school that primarily serves
first-generation, low-income Latino students.
“We’re taking the time to understand each person’s story,”
said assistant principal Moises Buhain. “It’s as simple as starting with a
name.”
As part of a social media campaign,
the “My Name, My Identity” initiative is seeking name stories with the
#mynamemyid hashtag. The push is personal for Yee Wan, the national association’s president and
the director of multilingual education services for the Santa Clara County,
California, office of education.
Wan came to the United States as an adolescent English
learner, and almost immediately faced pressure from instructors to adopt an
“American name” to replace her given name, which means “warm friendship” in
Cantonese.
Gundry and Wan developed “My Name My Identity” after
hearing a principal share a story about his effort to build connections with
English-language learners in school, then feeling the push fall flat when he
mispronounced the students’ names at graduation.
“As educators, we have the power to bring awareness to
valuing diversity … so that all of our students will feel included,” Wan said.
(S1) 3.1 How does this article provide evidence for
dysfunction in society?
