How to handle students calling you by your first name
You can manage this annoyance by ignoring the student or pretending you do not know who they are addressing until they use your formal last name. This boundary confusion often occurs when students interact with you outside the classroom, such as during home tutoring or at another job, causing them or their peers to bring your first name into the school environment.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
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How to handle students calling you by your first name
- 1Ignoring the student completely until they use the correct name2 people mentionedDid this help you?
- 2Pretending not to recognize the name by saying "I don't know who that is"Did this help you?
- 3Telling students that their brain is trained to not register or answer to their first name while inside the school building.Did this help you?
- 4Calling the offending student by their first and middle name to playfully deter the behavior.Did this help you?
- 5Explicitly explaining the difference between professional school environments and casual outside environments.Did this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Some call me by my “school name” and some address me by my first name. There was one student at school who was addressing me by my first name. When we got to work, he asked why I didn’t say hi to him.”source ↗
“how do y’all handle a student when they call you by your first name?”source ↗
“It’s annoying and I usually just ignore it or say “I don’t know who that is” until they call me Mr. LastName again.”source ↗
“I tutored a grade 6 student while I was a teaching assistant in a grade 7 class at the school. I was 27. He called me by my first name in his home, and one day at school I passed his class and a few of the students (not him even) yelled out my first name.”source ↗
Where this came up
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