What's Your Name? What's Your Numba

Remember when you were a kid and you picked out all the names you were going to give to your hundreds of children that you were going to have?  You weren’t excited about having a hundred kids but you were excited that you got to give them all names.  The ideal situation was to just have one, name it, and then give it away.  Maybe this was just me, so I’ll get to my point.

At E-World, when we get new students we get to give them English names.  As you can imagine, the prospect of this is very very exciting to me.  When I found this out I made a list of girls names and boys names written down in the order that I would dole them out.

So far, I have only gotten the chance to name three students – all girls.  The first I named “Neely” for it is my dream to have an entire class named after Jacqueline Susann characters.  Neely, who is now Becky, didn’t like the name so she chose Becky instead.  Neely is waaay better in my opinion, but alas.  Luckily the next new student I had was in that same class.  I named her Jackie.  She hates it.  Oh well.

On one occasion I had the chance to name a guy I met at a bar because he didn’t have an English name.  So I named him Sal, because I love Salvador Dali and my mother’s father’s name was Salvador and I thought it was a unique name that suited him.  He hated it.

Apparently I’m bad at this.

Anyway, so I have really been wanting to name one boy student “Mick.”  I was talking to Robbie about this and he told me he has been wanting to name a boy student “Raphael.” 

We were out at the bar the other night with one of our boss’s students.  He’s a 23-year-old guy who studies English with May at night and she asked us to go out with him and be his friend.  So about halfway through the night we realized he didn’t have an English name.  I quickly shouted “Mick!” and at the same time Robbie shouted “Raphael!”  Guess which one stuck.  Raphael.  Goddamnit.

Now we've started to come up with really bizarre names to name the kids because they don't know that the names are bizarre.  So far we have a list including Jafar, Oblina (ahh real monsters), Daria, Ursela, Bilbo, you get the idea...

 

Also, a teacher before me named one student Atreyoo from the movie The Never-Ending Story.  No one can pronounce it, and he hates it.  But it's perfect for him because that kid is such a little asshole.

The best is when I walk into class and there is a new student so I get to name him or her and then the rest of the class wants a new name too so they all yell out "Teacher!  Name change-ee!!  Name change-ee!"  Like their names are completely disposable things.  Cracks me up.