Time to play name that teacher

First-name experiment may be well intentioned, but it’s unlikely to change student-teacher relationships

“An authority figure is an authority figure. Power

supersedes title.”

EMMA TEITEL

School is officially in session and sexual education in Ontario has officially retreated to the Dark Ages (a.k.a. the late ’90s) under Premier Doug Ford. But this doesn’t mean progressive education is dead. In fact, there’s something very broad-minded going on at a number of public schools in the province.

According to a report in the CBC this week, teachers at some Ottawa schools are asking students to call them by their first names. The public broadcaster ran a radio segment recently, relaying the story of one Ottawa area school principal by the name of Ms. MacDonald who will henceforth be known to her students as Kim.

But this practice is not native to the nation’s capital. Calling teachers and administrators by their first names is all the rage in Finland, a famously informal society.

The policy has found fans in parts of Australia, too. According to a school administrator interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation earlier this year, a first name policy builds bridges between teacher and student. “I feel like I’m positioning myself as a learner alongside students, rather than this holder of all knowledge,” Sue Charleston told the ABC.

Advocates of the first name approach tend to believe that if instituted properly, such a policy can frame the teacher-pupil relationship in a friendlier, more collaborative light. Here is Joel Westheimer on the matter, a professor in the faculty of education at the University of Ottawa, speaking to the CBC.

“I think when schools change to a first-name basis, what they are trying to say is we’d like to have a closer relationship between teachers and students based more on mutual trust than on an assigned authority.”

Of course the idea isn’t popular with tradition-minded parents — some of whom grew up referring to their own fathers as “sir” — who believe a first name policy is disrespectful. This point of view asserts that kids should like their teachers but they shouldn’t be friends with their teachers. Some believe the familiarity of such a policy relaxes boundaries and gives students the false notion that the only difference between them and their educators is age, rather than authority and experience.

But this is B.S. In reality, it’s all B.S.: not merely the idea that first name policies enable disrespect but the opposing notion that they foster mutual trust and collaboration. How do I know this? No, I’m not a retired educator or a sociologist. Rather, I’m a former student who had the rare opportunity of experiencing both kinds of classrooms.

I’ve called my teachers Judy and David. And I’ve called them ma’am and sir. This is because from kindergarten to Grade 4, I attended a Jewish private school where first names were the norm. My first school experience was in a strictly first name environment.

Hearing adults referred to by Mr. or Ms. was something I witnessed almost exclusively in the movies until I left Jewish day school for my local public school a few years later, where surnames were the rule. And I cannot stress this more: the change made zero difference.

An authority figure is an authority figure. Power supersedes title. A hard-ass teacher isn’t any less formidable because you call her Dorothy (especially if she’s served in the Israeli army) just as a pushover teacher isn’t any more imposing if you call him sir. The distinction between first and last name is, I suspect, more important to adults than it is to kids.

This isn’t to say that names don’t matter. Of course they do. There is a boatload of research indicating that names denote certain feelings and can potentially influence the course of a person’s life.

One American study from the late 2000s suggests that girls with names considered to be very feminine such as Emma, Anna or Elizabeth are less likely to pursue math and physics after 16.

But where the student-teacher relationship is concerned, it isn’t first names or surnames that ultimately command respect and facilitate collaboration. It’s behaviour. It was a bonus that Miss Honey of Roald Dahl’s Matilda was called Miss Honey. If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it follows that a Miss Honey by any other name would command equal devotion from her kids.

And a Miss Trunchbull by any other name would still scare the living crap out of them.