What's In a Name?

One thing that I have loved about Korea is giving kids English names. In schools every kid has an English name, and most are common ones like Sarah, Mike etc. You also get the strange, slightly misspelled names like "Sera" (Sarah) or Mikel (Michael)

At my school though, they seem to have gone through a process. Older students (some of whom have moved on) have had names like "Silver" and "Genius". Then, and for the life of me I can't figure out why, they started naming every boy "Daniel" (or Dan, Danny) and every girl "Jenny" or "Jinny" (which as far as I can tell is a name that exists solely in Korea). This had led to more than a few communication problems, and even grading of the wrong tests. I have also made the kids put their Korean names on everything they give to me as well, just so I can double check who is who. I got to name one class about six months ago and to this day we have "Neville", "Trina" and a "Yustina" (though i didn't give her that one).

We finally said something, but that month two new boys, both Daniel. We got a bit frustrated when Mike graded a dozen of my book reports for the wrong Daniel and then filed them in his folder (they were in the pile with his students, apparently the Korean co-teachers also find it confusing). So we got a bit more vocal and they agreed to stop naming every kid Daniel (or Dan, which as we explained to them is the same name).

Last month we had four new boys, three of them are "Kevin". Sign.