I’m not ready to allow my students to call me by my first name, but only because I’m not sure what administration might think, and I suspect that some of my more traditional colleagues might hate me for it.
Mind you:
Neither one of these things are non-starters for me. I’m more than willing to push back on administration, and I’m also more than willing to annoy my more traditional colleagues if I think my decision is correct.
I just haven’t found the right time to pull the trigger yet.
See if you agree with my rationale:
It’s been argued many times that titles like Mr., Mrs., and Ms. are signals of respect.
I don’t agree with this, of course,. In fact, I think it’s nonsense. If you need a prefix to garner respect, and if you need your students to use a prefix to demonstrate respect, you have a problem earning and maintaining the respect of your students. I had plenty of teachers in high school and college who preferred that I use their first name, and I respected those teachers and professors just as much as I did the teachers and professors who insisted in the use of their titles.
In many cases, those “first name only” teachers were some of the best teachers I’ve ever had:
But let’s out that aside for now.
Here is my real issue:
The titles that teachers use are sexist, patriarchal artifacts of a bygone time. They only serve to identify sex and, in some cases, marital status.
If you’re a man like me, for example, you use the title Mister, which only indicates that I am a man.
That’s weird.
My students demonstrate respect by using a title that defines my sex organs?
Why is that relevant or appropriate?
But with women, it’s even worse, because they often identify their marital status with their title as well. Not only does their title identify their sex organs, but if they choose to use Missus, they are also asking students to recognize that they are married.
Also very weird.
Why are sex organs and marital status relevant or associated in any way with respect?
Of course, a woman can choose to avoid using Mrs. and use Ms. instead, which is fine, except that a large number of people will assume that she is not married, which also may not matter, but why are men’s marital statuses never relevant when it comes to their title but a woman’s marital status is?
There is no married form of Mister.
There is also Miss, of course, typically reserved for a young lady who isn’t so old enough to make us wonder if she’s married, thus turning Ms. into the title for women who are unmarried, divorced, and even widowed.
Can you see how stupid these titles are? My students walk around all day, calling me Mr. Dicks, which is simply a weird acknowledgement that I have man parts under my clothing.
Add my last name to the mix, and things get even weirder. Sort of a hat on a hat situation.
One of my students sometimes calls me “Teacher” to annoy me, but the more I think about it, “Teacher ” is a better name than Mr. Dicks because it least doesn’t drag sex, gender, or the patriarchy into my name. At least it doesn’t rest on the patriarchal notion that women should make their marital status clear while men need not.
I still don’t like “Teacher.” It’s too informal, and when a second teacher is present, it’s fairly useless.
Ideally, I’d like my students to call me Matt, because it’s my name and I don’t require titles built upon my man parts and the patriarchy in order to earn my students’ respect.
I also anticipate a day – probably very soon – when a nonbinary, gender fluid, or asexual teacher is forced to push back on these archaic titles, too.
Why wait? Let’s fix this stupidity now.
It seems exceptionally reasonable to me for my students to call my by my first name, even though I suspect that it might cause more than a few heads to explode if I tried it.
Again, a few exploding heads is no reason to avoid doing what I think is right, so that day may come, sooner or later, when I tell my students on the first day to call me, “Matt.” In additional to administration and some colleagues pushing back, I may have some unhappy parents, too. But my hope is that when I explain how the title of Mister only serves to identify my sex organs, they might see my logic and agree.
This world does not, however, always run on logic.
