The Writing’s on the Wall (In Red)
In a multi-cultural class, I always try to keep a list of the students’ names on the whiteboard, less for me to remember (years of teaching has trained me to remember names pretty well) but more for the students to learn each other’s names, tricky sometimes when the names all come from different languages.
When I wrote Teenie’s name on the whiteboard, adding her to the list of all the other students in the class at that time, I unwittingly made a faux pas that I didn’t discover for several weeks. It’s often the case in our school that blue and black whiteboard markers are out of stock, and I end up with only a red marker for a week or two. And so it happened that I wrote Teenie’s name in red.
Teenie comes from Hong Kong, and there, as in many other Asian cultures, you should never write anybody’s name using red ink. As far as I understand it, it’s connected to death. I’d vaguely heard this custom before, but obviously hadn’t remembered it when I wrote her name up that day. The only reason I found out was because another Asian student politely mentioned it to me; when I asked the usually outspoken Teenie about it, she politely told me that because I was her teacher, she wasn’t able to tell me. Another cultural norm - high respect of teachers - leaving the problem unsolved for a long time. Poor Teenie! I apologised profusely and immediately rewrote her name in another colour, and in the future I’ll definitely be more careful about which pen I’m using.
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