Day 34: The Name Game

It's really interesting how names work here in Korea. When someone introduces themselves, they always give their last name first. Last names are always one syllable only, and first names are always two names hypenated together. For example, my boss' name is Park Jonge-Oh, and his daughters are Park Yae-Na and Park Yae-Lin. Apparently close to 40% of Koreans have either their last name as Lee, Park or Kim!!! (Side note: when searching for potential partners, its considered inappropriate to marry someone with the same last name, even if they're not related to you. This makes the 'dating pool' really small for people with one of those names! Also, married women keep their maiden names for life - I think that's cool!)

Now when it comes to their English names, that's a whole different story! Many Koreans have an English name, on top of their real Korean name. They either get to pick their own English name themselves (which I think would be fun - imagine how cool it would be if you could just pick any name for yourself?), or if they're young like the kids I teach, their names are picked for them by either their parents or their teacher. Almost all of my students have an English name, and this has made it a lot easier for me to learn everyone's name.

I've always been really good at remembering people's names, and so far this has held up quite well at work. When I first started teaching I had like thirty names of kids to remember, and so far I have done quite well with this. In the past I've most often used physical appearances to remember people's names (ie: hair colour, eye colour, height, weight, etc.) but that hasn't been very useful here in Korea! (all my kids have black hair and brown eyes! haha!)

It's kinda funny, some of the names that their parents choose for their kids. A lot of times they will just pick an English word that 'sounds nice' to give to their kids as their English name. Consequently, I have students with names like Cherry, Candy, and Grapes (food seems to be a popular theme...) and have heard of other teachers with student names like Apple, Ferry, and Cloudy. The problem with English names arise when the kids are quite young, like still in their kindergarten years. At this stage in their lives they have not had an English name very long, so a lot of time you call out to them but they don't respond just because they're simply not used to being addressed with that name. Also, their parents can sometimes change their names on a whim if they feel like 'picking a better name' for their child. This has proved to be rather confusing for me when all of a sudden a student I've known for a month suddenly has a new name! A few examples - Mini became Lina, Thomas became Daniel, etc. I have one new student who just started this week and he's had a different name almost every day this week! On Monday he was Peter, on Wednesday he was Joseph, and today he was Tom. Who knows what he'll be tomorrow?

If you're curious as to how I'm addressed at work, well I thought that it was going to be "Mr. Erdman" as it would have been most likely if I was teaching in North America, but our school seems to be fairly casual about that sorta thing. I am addressed by either "Teacher", "Scott", or most often "Scott-Teacher" which I think is rather cute! I guess it's about as self-explanatory as it can get - it's both my personal name and my relation to the students all wrapped into one name that can be shouted out loudly at their leisure. It was a little strange at first, but I actually quite like it now. :-)