Please Join Me in Honoring....Uh, What's Your Name?

Well, it's school awards assembly time! That time of year when parents are unjustly punished for bearing and rearing intelligent offspring. Ah, the feel of hard, metal folding chairs beneath my ever aging bones, the closeness of fellow parents as we're crammed into the undersized gymnasium like wads of stuffing into the cavity of a turkey, the warmth of the stagnant air as the one, overworked rotary fan attempts to cool a room full of sweaty, squirmy adolescents. And, of course, that one grandparent who invariably sits near me and drones on and on and on and on throughout the entire assembly with facts, stories, jokes, comments, and other fascinating anecdotes I DON'T CARE ABOUT! It's like having a mosquito buzzing nonstop in your ear, and you just want to stick a pencil into your brain to kill it and end the noise! But I digress. Awards. It is nice to see the kids who actually do what they are supposed to do in school acknowledged for once. Usually, it's the kids who are wreaking havoc who get the attention. So, awards are good. Acknowledgment is good. Recognition is good. You know what else is good? Not butchering the name of the kid that's getting the award! There's something phony and hypocritical about blathering on about how special someone is and how proud you are to honor him or her and then mispronouncing the kid's name. This happened many times throughout the middle school awards ceremony. How hard would it have been to look over the list of winners and learn how to pronounce the names correctly? We're not talking about some multicultural mecca school with lots of foreign names here; it's Southern Maryland for goodness sakes! Note to school administators: DO YOUR HOMEWORK!!!