The Birth of No Name Student

Here is reason 37 why I don’t bother to prepare for my classes: After spending 10 minutes of my life preparing the lesson plan and accompanying game or activity, the odds of me arriving to class and finding faces that I’ve never seen before is about one in ten. The odds of somebody informing me prior to class that I might find new faces that day is precisely one in one hundred. Hence, after having spent ten minutes determining how much of the lesson we should cover that day, and how many copies of everything is needed for the activity, a huge chunk of class is spent initiating the new student. The 10 minutes of my life spent planning ahead for a lesson that we wouldn’t have time for, could have been used planning an activity that accounted for the new face. But, no. That would make way too much sense.

Last week I found yet another random face in one of my elementary level classes. I decided to start the ball rolling from the most obvious point: did this random face have a name? No. As it turns out, she did not. Every now and then I get a new student that refuses to speak to me. They speak English perfectly fine and they understand what I'm saying - they just see no reason to respond to basic questions like: What is your name? This is a problem. After two minutes of torture, trying to get the new student to stop giggling and provide me with her name, I resolved this the only way I knew how: I assigned her a name.

I don’t generally like to name my students. I would much rather learn their Korean name than assign them an English one. My efforts are usually undermined by one of the Korean teachers, who end up giving them an English name anyways. They often forget to inform me of this point, and I’ll spend another month horribly mispronouncing some kid’s name, until the class decides to let me in on the joke. If I do get stuck having to name a student, I have the class brainstorm some names on the board and have the student pick the one that they like best. Given the new student’s refusal to use her words to communicate with me, I was going to just have to pull a name out of a hat. I had two bits of information about this student to go on: she apparently had no name, evidenced by her refusal to provide me with one, and she giggled a lot. No Name seemed more descript and less creepy than Giggles, so No Name Student was born.

The other students thought that No Name Student was a hilarious moniker, and broke into fits of laughter every time I called on her. The rest of the class, with the exception of her cousin, clearly thought No Name Student was a moron. See, No Name Student knew perfectly well that I was asking her name, and she even understood when I specified that I’d like to know her real (Korean) name. Any doubt of this was removed when Loud Student asked to speak Korean so that he could clarify whether or not she was shy, or just an idiot. Given that she spent the rest of the week after this shouting Hello at me and giggling, when she’s about three years too old for this to still be acceptable behaviour, it’s clearly the latter case.

Any guilt or sense of shame felt over having named a 12 year old “No Name Student” has been eased by her continued asshattery throughout the week. Someday, she might get the memo that foreigners are only funny the first time that you meet them - after that, they almost become like Real People. Until then, her moniker of No Name Student sticks.