The Naming Hat

So, most of my entries are about me having battles of wits with rodents, pouncing on fish out of water, and generally making a fool of myself and loving it. But believe it or not, I’m also an English teacher. That’s what all thirty of the original Cambodia 1 group came here to work at for two years. This job has many trials and tribulations, and doing the job in a foreign system in a foreign country only adds to said trails and tribulations. However, I want to share a moment of true success and enjoyment for everyone. And if you don’t like it, well then you are just a boring person with no sense of humor.

I teach 5 different classes in the 10th and 11th grade (though ages range from 14-22 in some of them…). There’s an average of 40 some kids in each class (more are registered, but they are never all there at once), so that’s about 200 kids total. One of my goals has been to learn all their names but this task is rendered nigh impossible since their names are so damn hard for me to remember. I can remember a few Sophal’s, Sophea’s, Rothana’s, etc but at the rate I was going I wouldn’t know half of them before my two years here were up. What I really wanted was them to choose English names. This wasn’t for any sort of indoctrination purposes, or to tell them their names weren’t good enough. In fact one of my own personal crusades is to somehow do this job without conveying a sense, at any point in time, that what I do is “right” and what they do is “wrong” because the last thing I want to be is a sort of language missionary. However, giving names from the language you are studying is a pretty common practice (in middle school Spanish I was “Jaime”, with a little accent thing over the A that I don’t know how to do in Microsoft word.). My first attempt to give names flopped pretty hard because they just don’t know enough English to pick a variety of names.

But unperturbed, myself and some of the other volunteers decided to just flat out assign names. We would write ten or so options on the board and as they were picked, we would add new choices and so on until the entire class had chosen names. Eventually they learned to pounce on preferable names or they would be taken before them.

This will go down in history as one of the most fun things I’ve done here. For one, it promised to make my job significantly easier with more familiar names to call them. I know, I'm an imperialist dog. Secondly, they were absolutely thrilled to have the names, asked me what they meant, and started calling each other by them almost immediately. But perhaps my favorite part of the process is that after running out of many normal names, I had to start stretching my imagination to further naming options… Here are some examples.
• Almost every one I am friends or family with is represented in my classes. I’ve got Jess, Jenni, Fommy (not Tommy), Nick, James, Brenna, etc etc. If I know you, chances are I call on you in class.
• I also have pretty much all the other Peace Corps Volunteers represented. I resisted naming anyone after staff, in case they visit my site and don’t approve of their avatar. Anyway, lets move on to the more fun ones.
• I have the entire cast of Seinfeld. In one class. I also have Putty and Mulva.
• Most of the key Muppets. Gonzo, Fozzie, Kermit, what have you. Bunsen and Beaker appear to be good friends already. Couldn’t really justify naming someone “Miss Piggy” though.
• The four ninja turtles. Leonardo and Raphael are sitting next to each other, in fact. Which is good because Shredder is in the same eleventh grade class. Bebop and Rocksteady, luckily, are still in grade ten.
• A series of Roman emperors: Caesar, Nero and Caligula. No one seemed interested in “Marcus Aurelius”.
• To accompany the emperors, I have a bunch of various gods too. Thor, Zeus, Anubis, Osirus, Neptune, BY ODIN’S HAMMER!
• The Thundercats. I’ve got a Liono, Tigra, Panthro, and even Snarf. Skeletor broods in the back of the room.
• A sampling of American Gladiators.
• Harry Potter characters. I feel like the new Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher that everyone is staring at and whispering about, anyway.
• Almost the entire Fellowship of the Ring (except for Merry, because I had already named a girl “Mary”). In an appropriate twist, the fellowship is “broken” across three different classes. I have faith Boromir will overcome fate this time around.
• Garfield and Nermal
• Calvin and Hobbes
• Laverne and Shirley
• Kent. Not spectacular in and of itself (sorry Andrew), but when he chose his name, my student came up to the front and wrote something in front of Kent on my paper… He then looked me in the eye and just said “CLARK Kent.” Blew my mind.
• Voltron (can’t believe no one wanted “Optimus Prime”…)
• Slash and Axel Rose
• Napoleon and Genghis Khan
• Sha-nay-nay (I have no idea how to actually spell it)
• Tony Danza

And finally, my crowning achievement in naming…
• The Fonz. It’s my goal to have him respond “’EYYYYY!!” every time I call on him.

Anyway, the kids seem just about as excited about the new names as I am (as hard as that may be to believe), and have been hounding me about handing out name tags next week. Unfortunately I don’t think my current salary will allow for the 200 lanyards and tag-holders they seem to want me to buy, but such are the breaks! Just having something that engages them is worth its weight in gold... And in this case, it just happens to be comedic gold as well.