What's in a Name?

What's in a Name?

During my first week of school I was told that I was to give every student an English name. This sounds fun right? I was way excited about it. My first reaction was to give crazy names like Jack Bauer or Chewy from Star Wars. I thought of some pretty good names, but then I realized that probably wasn't the best idea and probably not very mature on my part J. I decided to act more like an adult, and give them some what normal names. I thought a lot about it and I realized that I would want to pick my own name. I used good old google and looked up a bunch of baby name websites and I wrote down about a million names. I went to my first week of class and I told the students they could come up with their own names and if they needed help I had a notebook full of names that they could look at. They couldn't believe how many names I had. It was pretty funny. I told them they needed to have a name picked by next week. I went back to class the following week and I found the students had come up with some pretty awesome names. Here are a few…

Blue

Carpet

Wall

Ceiling

Tank (personal favorite)

Vacation

Candy 

Harry Potter

Harry Peter (we had to fix that one)

Twinkle

Small Bear

Peter (this girl just wouldn't let it go. She was absolutely determined to have Peter even though I told her several times it was a boy's name. She claimed, "but I think it is very interesting.")

Green

Black

Kung Fu

Kobe

LeBron James

Michael Jackson

Boss

Uncle Sam (pretty clever I thought)

Hero

I promise some students did have some normal names, but I just liked these ones. 

I had a few students who didn't pick a name. I let my maturity slip; I couldn't help but give out a few names…Obama, Jason Bourne, Superman, and Jack Bauer. I also named a few after my best friends… Ellen, Lindsay, Abbey, Rylee, Chelsie, Tom, Russell, and CJ. If my friends couldn't come to China at least I could have a Chinese version of them right? Hah, I thought it was a genius idea. You might think I'm cruel for letting the students have such crazy names but where is the fun in having a name like Bob, Fred, or George? What's in a name anyways?