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I named my daughter Saoirse. That's "seer-sha," and it's Gaelic for freedom. In case you are interested, here are some other nice Irish names you can't say.

Of course we don't expect anyone to be able to say it correctly the first or even first couple of times. We have to repeat ourselves multiple times when we say her name. When someone, in exasperation or wonder asks me to spell it, I say "It won't help! But it's S-A-O-I-R-S-E." Their eyes always sort of roll slowly sideways and back into their heads.

When I was teaching middle school, there was a girl from a Hmong family who had a traditional name and used it. The kids mocked her, purposefully exaggerating and butchering her name. I came down hard about it. It hurt my feelings and I am sure it hurt hers.

In the teachers lounge, when I vented about it, they all put on their long-suffering faces. "Yeah, but it's a weird name!"

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Your name, your identity, your belonging

PBS recently did a special on a program called My Name, My Identity that is encouraging educational staff to do better about pronouncing students' names correctly. The soul of this program is about helping children from minority cultures to feel welcome and safe.

Your name is a significant, integral part of how you see yourself and where you feel you belong. If, everywhere you go, people are exasperated with or laugh at your name, you fail to feel a belonging with them or that place.

Especially for kids who have names like delicate threads to their home, asking them to put up with our butchering, bastardizations or new, easier pronunciations prevents them from making connections.

When you don't care enough to say someone's name correctly, it's a way of saying, "You don't belong. Not the way you are."

When you actually care about a person, you care that you say their name correctly.

The poet Warsan Shire wrote: "give your daughters difficult names. give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. my name doesn't allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right."

At some point, a student/person might feel better with a name that everyone can pronounce. Maybe that will help them feel they belong when they have strong enough ties to home. What matters is that you follow their lead.

If Mohieddin (moh-hee-uh-DEEN) asks to be called "Mo," fine. But it's nice when it's not exasperation with mispronunciations that gets us there. A choice that a child isn't forced into, but comes to on their own...a belonging, not a need to sever ties with their heritage.

Schools, especially, have a vested interest in helping all students to feel welcome, safe, and included. As our friend Mazslow taught us, people who don't feel safe can't care about division, context clues, or the water cycle.

How to say people's names

In this brave new world of internet abundance, you can find help pronouncing any name. You can ask the person to say their name, and should. But when it's done in front of a group, it can be humiliating. Especially for children.

When a teacher, an adult, a coach, a leader can say a child's name without a grimace, elongated awkward vowels, or laughed-through apologies, it's usually nothing to the rest of the class. A teacher who makes a big deal out of saying a student's name only encourages the class to do the same.

Admittedly, sometimes that can't be helped.

You can take the pledge to say people's names correctly here.

I love when people write pronunciations with their unique names. If you think we might mispronounce it, go ahead and add in a phonetic, dumbed-down version for us. We can't know how to say all the names from everywhere, especially when people are always coming up with new ones.

I always write "SEER-sha" in the margin of any of her forms and I am still waiting to meet someone who isn't really pleased that they already know how to say it. It will be exciting to have that immediate connection.

Especially if a person has a name that ties them to a delicate heritage, such as that of immigrants, refugees, and minority or sidelined cultures, letting a child keep their actual name allows them to have their own identity.

Photo credits: Ilmicrofono Oggiono via Flickr/CC; US Dept of Education via Flickr/CC