one of the things that you occasionally get to do as an english teacher in taiwan is to give a kid an english name. i started a new class last night, and as i prepared i noticed that several of the kids had no western names listed. i thought about all of the good names - i have thought about using names from the nba here in basketball crazy taiwan, but my boss told me to make the names normal. i love the idea of having a student named Lebron (i could call him 'bron 'bron!) but it would be a little weird. besides, at some point i may be given a chinese name so i don't want to create bad name karma. i really like my grandfather's name - Marshall. It's a good southern name, it sounds very American to me, and it's possibly coming back into vogue thanks to eminem. but when it came down to it, these kids didn't look like Marshalls. Ultimately, I had two boys to name, and i named them Mark and Kevin after my good friends from college. I now feel kind of protective of these two - as i teach them ABC i really want them to do well. So far, mark is doing fine, but kevin is a little bit slow. there was also a girl with no name, and the moment she walked in i knew that she should be called Sarah. As it turned out, she had already been named Sarah. i guess someone else agreed with me.
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someone changed mark's name to evan. considering i named him, and i named the other boy kevin, i am not pleased. but i guess that's the way it goes.
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