I applaud your insights and efforts as a teacher. I taught “the foreigners” in college and tried to memorize the names before the first day. I couldn’t pronounce them all “correctly” since they represented dozens of languages. I would say to other, please correct me if I mispronounce your name. I think we need to empower students in Kindergarten and first grade. The teacher should call out each name individually and say, “How you pronounce your name?” Let the child pronounce and try to imitate it. Since many classrooms are multicultural—and in Houston my kids are very much in multicultural settings with names from everywhere—the teacher can then say after waiting for the child to say their name, “Pease correct me if I don’t get it right, and I’ll try to get it write.” With each child. This is what teaching should be about, self-empowerment of children through direct interaction with authority figures.
This piece is obviously thought and emotion provoking, so I thank the writer for bringing this up. It is not a minor item, but a major even in the lives of our children who first walk into a classroom as a baby (3 and 18 months for my kids). First day of class, every new teacher.