To think that teachers should be able to distinguish BAME students by name?

[maggiethecat]

I have 2 DDs at different secondary schools and we have recently been having animated table discussions arising from the BLM protests. Both girls separately experienced teachers repeatedly confusing their names with the handful of other BAME students in the class. 13 yo DD cannot understand why she is repeatedly confused with another BAME girl who is much taller than her and unlike DD wears glasses. Apparently the offending teachers do not have this memory deficit with white students in the class

I'm not BAME, so I'm loath to say YABU because I can't know.

I am a teacher though (albeit not in a school) and mix up names from time to time, but actually very infrequently compared to the number of student names I need to learn. It happens much more frequently that the students can't be arsed to remember my name and just call me 'teacher'.

I also work exclusively with international students and don't think that makes any difference tbh.

@enthusiasmisdisturbed I don’t think it is enough. A teacher in a school is being accused of being racist in this post which is a serious accusation that if raised could impact that teachers career.

It seems ridiculous to not even bother to find out whether this teacher muddles up multiple names of students - both white and BAME in all other classes or interactions in the school for which the op daughter is not present.

If the speaker of the house can remember 600 MPs names and constituencies I'm sure a teacher can remember a class or two

maggiethecat
"I have 2 DDs at different secondary schools and we have recently been having animated table discussions arising from the BLM protests. Both girls separately experienced teachers repeatedly confusing their names with the handful of other BAME students in the class."

Haven't read the whole thread but I assume the op has met at least one of these teachers at parents' evening? Did her daughters attend as well - how did the teacher/s address her dds then?

@BubblyBarbara I don't think that is fair, not everyone is good at the same things. My memory isn't great, 600 names would be impossible for me, but there are other things I am really good at.

OP, YABU for the title of your thread, which should read:

AIBU to think that the teachers at my DCSs schools should be able to distinguish BAME students by name?

You're pissed off that that your children's teachers can't distinguish the specific and you do exactly the same.

Irony much?

@echt that’s the worst kind of not picking. Adds zero value to the discussion. Glad you got it off your chest though.

In an ideal world yes. But thinking back to my schooldays my teacher used to confuse me with my sister, who looked nothing like me, I was tall and shy with bright red hair, she was confident, short, with brown hair and four years younger than me. It's being going on since there have been schools. It really isn't a racist thing.

Theweepies manybon her has said it’s unconscious bias or unconscious racism

Not direct racism

And so the op’s daughters experience is to be disregarded as more information is needed to justify their experience

Would you really question me if I told you my boss was sexist when he praised my male co worker but not myself when we had equally worked on a project together

Do you think BAME people do not have the intelligence or awareness to notice when people are being indirectly racist, when unconscious bias perceptions are used towards them or notice that for some reason they are being singled out

why connect the two pupils because they are black?

I connect pupils who are blond, pupils who are tall, pupils with brown short hair, pupils that are quiet, pupils who are loud. How is connecting due to race any different? It's about how your brain categorises things to help you remember. If I alter a seating plan I often use the wrong names because I connect a student to a place in the room. This isn't racist!

To the PP who mentioned Lewis, Louis, Lewies... I hear you!!

I confuse children in my school all the time. If they have a similar hair cut, glasses, ability-in fact, anything can get me confused. I’m hopeless with names. I really wouldn’t take it personally.

Teachers regularly confuse kids who look even slightly similar...it’s nothing personal just so difficult to remember 400+ names and i suppose they make subconscious links based on what people look like. They do it with all kids, skin colour really doesn’t influence this only that your kid is more likely to be confused with someone with similar colouring. I really don’t think this happens any more with BAME kids, in fact it’s usually the blonde ones I do this with. Maybe it depends where you live though? Where I’m from it’s honestly not something people really think about. But I do understand it’s just annoying and quite dismissive when someone repeatedly gets your name wrong.

I really do try to get the right name with the right kid, pronounced in the right way, shortened in the right way if that's what the kid prefers. I ask children to tell me if I'm saying their name wrongly or if I'm using a form they don't like eg i have a Harpreet who prefers Harry, I suspect because it makes them stand out less which is a whole other can of worms, and I try my best to remember that. However, as a SEN TA in a large secondary school, I can be sent to work with any one of over a thousand children and sometimes I get it wrong. When I do, I apologise and try hard to do better next time. I do this with children of all colours, races and faiths. For example, I have a red headed James and a red headed Jamie. I confuse them a fair bit and they don't like it but I apologise and keep trying.

Happened to me in school! I was always called by the only other brown girls name. Furious.

Teachers remember names. Confusing the names of BAME students is shady.

I have the most dreadful memory for faces. If there are two tall girls with blonde hair I will mix them up. I also mix up faces that look absolutely nothing alike.

When watching my daughter in a ballet show I could not tell which one she was because the girls all had their hair in identical buns. If someone is wearing similar clothes to someone else I will mix them up.

It's nothing to do with race. I would be totally unable to give police etc a description of someone unless there was a VERY distinctive feature.

OP, sorry that your kid’s teachers get her name mixed up.

I’m aware that what I’m about to say sounds pretty awful..... I’m a teacher, and I’ve always really struggled with names. I haven’t had this exact problem (my school doesn’t have many black pupils, so it would actually be quite hard to mix them up), but at the beginning of the year I do try and find one distinctive feature of a pupil to hang their name on e.g. A has really curly hair, B has freckles. So at the beginning of the year I could easily mix up names for pupils with similar features. This is most likely to happen with the youngest pupils as I find them harder to tell apart as they are a bit more reticent so you can’t tell them apart so easily by personality.

If your daughter is very much in a minority at her school because of her skin colour, then it is a distinguishing feature. So although annoying to her to be grouped together by race, it’s the same as mixing up two girls with ginger hair, or two boys with similar glasses. Everything else about they may be very different! I’m not saying this as an excuse really, but just as an explanation of how easily this can happen when you teach hundreds of pupils. I have to admit I’m surprised at it still happening at this time of year.

I would also say in my experience (of having mixed pupils up!), they remember that you did it FOREVER because to them it is rather offensive, but they don’t remember the time you did it to someone else s it just doesn’t have that personal impact, so it is possible there’s some element of bias in what they remember - although it might happen to them more often, I wouldn’t guarantee the teachers in question don’t mix up white pupils too!

(Big caveat - I don’t know the teachers in question. Just saying one way it could happen without being especially racist)

Have your daughters asked other pupils whether this is happening or has happened to them before assuming it’s a race issue?

It shouldn't be on the victims (or potential victims, if you prefer) of discrimination to conduct surveys and do detective work among their white peers before telling their mum they feel discriminated against.

Sure, there'd be some exploratory work to be done if OP were taking legal action, but it wouldn't be conducted by the child victim!

No child should carry that burden, and the fact that the child's account is being questioned and other possible explanations offered is how structural racism works to condition BAME people into accepting their lot in life and being discouraged from raising legitimate issues around discrimination throughout their lives.

BAME people are shamed for 'playing the race card' all the time, meaning fewer people complain, meaning that the ones who do look over-sensitive because 'no-one else is complaining, just you'.

I have sympathy with teachers getting names mixed up from time to time, as I have very poor facial recognition myself. But to consistently confuse the only two BAME girls in the class isn’t acceptable, and I think it would be fair to raise this with the school. I’d like to think it was unconscious, but that doesn’t make it okay.

Not really relevant but perhaps amusing - when my dad is annoyed with me, he calls me by my mum’s name!

Yep I mix kids up all the time. Two blonde lads with glasses I had to deliberately sit further apart. When you're focusing on delivery and teaching your brain is on that, Nd it gets muddled up. It's not deliberately done, it's a teacher who is spinning deliver, model, scaffold, question and maintain behaviour plates and one dropped. Sometimes the other plates drop temporarily too.

It's human error not deliberate.

Luke when the kids call me mum. Clearly I'm not their mum. Clearly they don't mean it. But I get called mum loads by kids in school, even big 6 ft 16 year old boys!!!

Not meaning to trivialise this but my eldest daughter called who is called for eg. Sandra has been called Sarah by one of her subject teachers for the whole 5 years she’s been at her school. She’s given up trying to correct him and just goes with it now, some of her teachers are just a little eccentric 🤣

I had little seating plans for my classes with their pictures on.
I only mixed them In the first few weeks up when I noticed the cheeky so and so’s had moved.

YANBU op.

YANBU.

It is a race issue and it's not okay but it happens.

I do it. Not often but it's happened on quite a few occasions. Never with girls or with Asian students but with black boys specifically and it's totally unacceptable, really embarrassing for me and really hurtful for the children. I can see from their reaction that it happens often to them and that they see it specifically as a race issue.

I have no idea why I do it. I have no issue remembering the names (they're usually either very familiar British names or very short, easy to remember derivatives of names from the child's culture) so it must be some subconscious (and ultimately racist!) failure in my brain to distinguish between children whose only real commonality is their skin colour.

I also confuse siblings and occasionally children who just remind me of another child but that is not the same and doesn't carry the same level of offence.

It needs to stop. I just don't know how to make sure it doesn't happen.

I've just realised that when was teaching drama my face blindness meant that the only way I was able to tell children apart was by hairstyles. All my mix ups were of children with similar hairstyles.

It's disgraceful and common. I had a manager who constantly mixed up the only 2 black staff in our office and they looked, sounded, behaved nothing alike.
This is lazy, and needs to be addressed. It's right up there with giving BAME people more 'English' sounding nicknames or names - also happened on a workplace I was at years ago where the only BAME guy was given a nickname close to but not his actual name. No one else had a nickname...

Happens to my DD and her class mate, my DH and class mate's parents from the same background. Names often being spelled incorrectly too. DH is a school governor and his name is spelled incorrectly on his visitor ID. This is a lovely school and we have a good relationshi with them. It IS a race thing, though, and most white people regardless of how "nice" we are do this at some point, even those of us with BAME spouses and children are not immune. It's important to recognise this happens and try to avoid doing it. I expect that most of the white people on this thread will not want to see that though.