157. I WON'T MISS SIR - On Naming Our Teachers
Harris Westminster, a school in London, has been in the news last week because it made the decision to ban students from referring to their teachers as either “sir” or “miss”. Students are to use the full name of the teacher (such as, if I were their teacher, Dr McKee), rather than the generic titles (although they can call someone simply “teacher” in a pinch) because the school’s Head, rightly, claims that the generic “sir” and “miss” monikers perpetuate gender inequality and cultural misogyny. Male teachers are, through being called “sir” by default, presented as high status - knights of the roundtable, given a title synonymous with great achievement. While female teachers called “miss”, meanwhile, are reduced to a claim (often inaccurate, and always irrelevant) about their marital status, and an infantilising one at that. “Sir” suggests an authority and comes loaded with deference, whereas “miss” has connotations of the novice or junior. Someone young and inexperienced. Someone not quite on the same level as their more esteemed male colleagues. Regardless of whether such connotations are explicitly intended or accurate is irrelevant - that is the underlying message the two conflicting titles give to students: men get honorary titles such as “sir” while women don’t, suggesting they can never be a man’s equal in status. Doing away with the convention, in schools like Harris Westminster and beyond, is an important step forward in the journey to gender equality. Not only for the teachers working within a school, but for the students who are subliminally taught by the convention to blindly accept structural inequality.
Yet many hearing the news, even if they agreed with the stance in principle, seemed to think the move was unlikely to stick, or catch on across the country. Versions of the same argument - that teachers have been called “sir” and “miss” in England for generations and it was unlikely to end anytime soon - were found across social media and repeated in the national press reporting on the story. The move was applauded, but also dismissed as a gimmick that would likely be ineffective.
When I first started teaching I tried to discourage students from calling me “sir” myself. I remembered how odd it had sounded when I was a student in my own school days, hearing some of my peers using these terms for all of their teachers instead of differentiating them by name as I did, and now here I was getting the same treatment. It made my skin crawl. “I haven’t been given a knighthood”, I would say - a dad joke of eye-rolling proportions, but true nevertheless - “I’m just a normal guy - who’s this sir? Just call me Dr McKee.” I had actually earned the doctorate and, working in basically one of the only institutions where the academic title bore any relevance, it would be nice to hear it used every now and again if we had to use formal titles. If I had my druthers, my students would’ve been able to just call me “DaN”, my actual name. This was how I got taught at my sixth form college. Philosophy, Sociology, and Psychology from Dermot, Elaine, Mike, and Sandra. Each specific name evoking the specifics of the person standing at the front of the class. The idea of using the same interchangeable “sir” with Dermot and Mike, or “miss” with Elaine and Sandra seems absurd to me, and denies each educator their unique traits and quirks that made them who they were. It didn't not damage our education at all to use a first name instead of their last and made us have far better relationships with each other in the classroom. But if we are going to insist on the formality of not be using first names then at least get it right - I’m Dr, not Mr, and that colleague next door is Ms, not Mrs…
But shoulders get shrugged here too. Just as we have been called “sir” and “miss” since time immemorial and can’t expect students to change the tradition of a lifetime, teachers irked by being given the wrong prefix were usually told some version of: “it’s hard for students to remember all the individual titles to names so don’t worry if they call you Miss instead of Ms or Mrs, or Mr instead of Dr.” And on the one hand, that’s true. And it isn’t really that important. I’ve had students get my name and title wrong in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways over the years and just ignored it and moved on - focused on the teaching I’m trying to do. However…that’s really just a position of privilege. Demanding to be called “Dr” is a bit embarrassing and it doesn’t really dehumanise or mislabel me to call me “Mr” instead. But for some titles it really is that important: if the “Mrs” is a symbol of a bad marriage long over, if the “Mr” or “Mrs/Miss” actually misgenders you. If the lack of “Dr” for a female colleague is a sign of a student’s disbelief that a woman can hold such a title. If the whole conversation about gendered titles is triggering and emotionally taxing. If you might be “Mr” today but feel more “Ms” tomorrow. We call getting such identifiers wrong “trivial” at our peril. More importantly, the idea that it is too much for a student to handle (the same idea that makes people balk at the idea of students having to remember individual names and lets the profession accept the one-size-fits-all generic monikers of “sir” or “miss”), points to the deeper problem with the historic acceptance of this baked-in cultural misogyny in school nomenclature. If you think getting students to remember a correct title is difficult, wait until you try and teach them an actual academic subject! If I expect a student to be able to distinguish between Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, or a Realist or an Anti-Realism, I should be able to expect them to be able to distinguish between their geography teacher and their Spanish teacher. Education is literally the job of helping getting someone who can’t do something to be able to do it. Of making someone who doesn’t know something be able to know it. It’s what we do. Any time we approach an area of education with an attitude of it being too difficult or even impossible for someone to do something, we make it so through a process of self-fulfilling-prophecy.
My bottom set group cannot achieve the same things as my top set group mostly because they are my bottom set group: I have, by calling them that, put a cap on what I believe it is possible for them to achieve and thus teach them accordingly. Had I not put anyone into sets and given all students the opportunity and resources to achieve as highly as possible, I might have been surprised by the results.
Student self-organisation and independence is another classic example - “they can never organise themselves”, people say, “they can’t do things independently so we have to treat them like babies and give them a million prompts, scaffolds, reminders and extensions”. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that, perhaps, it is the constant prompts, scaffolds, reminders and extensions that give students no reason to learn self-organisation. We make them dependent and then wonder why they can’t be independent.
Consider taking the same attitude to teaching students mathematics. Their first day in primary school, these children arrive in front of their teachers who have no idea of what mathematics is. Maybe they don’t even know numbers. You give them a few simple problems and they just cannot figure them out. If our approach to such a class was to shrug our shoulders and say it is impossible to teach them how to do it then such teachers would be out of a job. When a student comes to me ignorant of philosophy or theology, I don’t write them off as unteachable, I work with them until what they couldn’t do before they, eventually, can do. It takes time, but it happens.
It seems we pick and choose what we think it is worth teaching young people and investing the time in to change their original thoughts and behaviours about. They come to us without knowledge of maths, science, literature, history, art, and we spend years working with them to change all that. To help them build their knowledge and transform their skills. When we say conventions such as calling teachers “sir” or “miss” are so ingrained it is impossible to change them, that you can’t undo a lifetime of tradition, what we are really saying is that it just isn’t something we can be bothered to work at changing. I applaud Harris Westminster for making a different choice, and making the decision to teach students about cultural misogyny rather than succumb to unproven fatalism about it. I hope, rather than the rest of us declaring such problems to be unsolvable and such behaviours impossible to change, more and more schools apply their skills as professional educators to educating their students beyond the core curriculum and challenging questionable traditions and utterly changeable norms. Once we’ve tackled “sir” and “miss” we can start asking about why we feel it is so important to use formal titles at all and not teach our students as fellow human beings on a first name basis…but for now, let’s fight one battle at a time.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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