What's in a Name?

I’ve had a very busy week. Nick decided not to return to teaching so I worked his classes as well as my own. They are bringing Ed, who was working in Anshan city, to replace Nick and my schedule will change starting Monday. My classes will be light on Monday and Tuesday, heavy on Wednesday and Thursday, and I work a half day on Friday. I think the most annoying will be Tuesday, when I have one class the second period and one class the last period. This means I have to walk to work in the morning, work one hour, walk home, then walk back at 3:45, work another hour, then walk back home again. Still, I guess I shouldn’t complain. I’m making 3 times the usual salary for teachers (who have a high salary compared to other jobs) and I’m only working 24 hours a week.

As mentioned in my last post, I had the students choose an English name then practice introducing themselves. Although one might think this is straightforward enough, I had many occasions to laugh this week. I did provide the students with a list of names to choose from but some of them decided to look elsewhere for inspiration.

I have said that they are really into basketball so I have a number of Kobe’s and if that was taken, some of them wanted Bryant. I also have quite a few Jordan’s.

Quite a number of them used a glossary in the back of their English workbooks to find names and this was sometimes amusing because the names came from the lessons and were not always appropriate names. For example, there is a module on literature that focuses on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist so the names in the book appear in the glossary. I let Pip slide but I thought it would be cruel of me to allow one boy call himself Bumble.

In one class, a girl wanted to be called Apple, and I let that one go since it is now known because of Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter but then another girl in the same class also wanted to be called Apple so I told her it was taken and she said she wanted Orange, but I had to draw a line. I suggested a few names but this girl, who was on the chunky side, decided she wanted me to help her choose a name that meant “skinny” so I suggested Twiggy. She liked that one.

I had a few look in their dictionaries for words and they were probably the funniest. I wouldn’t let a girl call herself Monster and I didn’t let one boy call himself Super and refused another to call himself Phat but I got tired of arguing with the students sometimes and let a few weird ones slide like: Pound, G, Rock, Stone, Panda, and Demon. There were also a few I allowed, even though I have no idea where they came from: Geduo, Dill, Hebe, Lich, Chauncy, and Melo.

I have been given a Chinese name: 奧卓 (hopefully the characters come out ok). The pronunciation is close to that of my English name: ao zhuo (fourth and first tone, respectively [if you don’t know what I mean, I’ll explain more about the Chinese language in another post one day]). The first character means obscure/mysterious (though another character of the same pronunciation means proud/haughty!) and the second character means profound/outstanding. I have been told it is a good name and it has special meaning since the first character is also part of “Olympic” and I am here the year the Olympic games will be in Beijing.