Bro

[tom1980]

I was never in a school where teachers called students by their last names. I think it can be a good right of passage going into high school to stop using first names and have teachers call students Mr. or Miss whatever because it connotes entering adulthood and reinforces that young men and women must take responsibility for themselves. So often these days kids either have no parents involved and are never taught to act like adults or they have parents who are over bearing and do everything for them so that they never have to act like adults.

 

My first year of college, I had a roommate who had NEVER done his own laundry or cooked himself a meal. We roomed together for two years, and his mom called him every day to wake him up in the morning to make sure he got up and dressed in time for class. I finally got fed up with the phone ringing every morning at 6:30 when I didn't have class until 10 most days. I gave him an alarm clock for his birthday and started unplugging the phone every night before I went to sleep. My roommate secretly encouraged me, but his mom called the resident director and tried to get me expelled (EXPELLED!). The response was not what she expected; the RD was appalled that she had been waking up extra early (she lived in another time zone) to call her son every morning to wake him up for almost two years while he was at college. She thought it was especially mean spirited of me to disconnect the phone when she went through so much effort, but the RD (like me) viewed the fact that she chose to wake up an extra hour early every day for two years just so she could call her adult son to wake him up as a sign that she needed therapy. The roommate and I stopped living together after the second year because his mom paid for him to have a single room with no interfering roommate. He and I still hung out, and I would occasionally secretly disconnect his phone line when I was in his room. His mom started thinking there was something wrong with the phone lines in the dorm and demanded the university get an electrician to check it out.

 

Maybe if teachers had called my roommate Mr. D____ in high school, he would've started acting like an adult, had the balls to cut the umbilical cord, and taken responsibility for getting himself out of bed. Okay, maybe not. But I still think it is good to have some societal structures in place that signal to children that they are growing up and need to start acting more like adults and that simultaneously let parents know that their kids are no longer babies that should be free from taking any responsibility for themselves.

[DeNeufaille]

Passage of time? Linguistics? ..... an odd question Bro... lol

[+ WilliamM]

I was never in a school where teachers called students by their last names. I think it can be a good right of passage going into high school to stop using first names and have teachers call students Mr. or Miss whatever because it connotes entering adulthood and reinforces that young men and women must take responsibility for themselves.

 

I agree.

 

But, I should have been clearer. In my high school, teachers called students by their last names, with no Mr. or Miss before the last name. It may seem like a small thing, but over an entire school year it served to distance the teachers and the students in a negative way. I can only name a few of my high school teachers, whereas in lower grades and college (and beyond), I remember almost all my teachers/professors.

 

I do not know your roommate, so only you can judge whether being called by his last night in the manner I just described would have made a difference.

[Phil_musc]

Blurring of roles here - what is wrong with Mr., Mz., Mrs., Dr. So-and-so?

 

Teachers are first and foremost teachers - they aren't parents or buddies and they shouldn't be treated as such. Students are still students and I see nothing wrong with using their first names. But I expect my students to call me Mr. unless I tell them otherwise.

 

As far as the roommate who's mother called him every dayto make sure he was up - I think therapy for her was long overdue. But that is actually a different matter.

[bostonman]

Blurring of roles here - what is wrong with Mr., Mz., Mrs., Dr. So-and-so?

 

Teachers are first and foremost teachers - they aren't parents or buddies and they shouldn't be treated as such. Students are still students and I see nothing wrong with using their first names. But I expect my students to call me Mr. unless I tell them otherwise.

 

Again, I think it depends on the situation. In purely *academic* teaching, I can see the reasoning. But with my kind of work in teaching theatre, I do think a more informal (yet still respectful) system is actually preferable, since we *are* necessarily dealing with elements of training that involve exploration of personal/emotional reaction, permitted physical interaction, and other factors that involve and demand closer inter-personal relationships than in a lecture hall, lab, or even on more specialized academic projects (yet still, always with limits of respect and basic teacher/student boundaries understood and expected). I find that even when we've hosted, say, master classes with "star" actors, etc, they as well prefer to be on a first-name basis with the students. In our case, it provides a needed bit of openness between teacher and student that perhaps is not needed, or even not wanted, in other disciplines.