A Tale of 3 Sakis

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I taught quite a few classes with students who had the same or similar names. The worst was probably the class with Kana and Kanna because their names were only slightly different, so I had to be extra careful calling on them.

However, today I'd like to talk about my junior high class that contained three Sakis and how I eventually learned to address them. As I mentioned in the other post, I only began to realize this was an issue I'd have to overcome once I really started buckling down and learning the students' names. It also may not have helped that I learned my students given names rather than their family names (though given the number of students with Inoue as a last name I hesitate to say this for sure). The reason for this was simple, everyone called me Eric-sensei. I've often wondered why this was the case. After all, I think they realized it was my first name. Most ALTs I knew were treated the same way unless they insisted otherwise.

So, there were three Sakis in the same class, which was fine for a while. After all, I could call on them while pointing or address them in conversation. The real problem came from talking about them to other students. How was I supposed to differentiate them? Growing up, we would usually just add the first letter of the person's last name to distinguish them. I remember being called "Eric P." for a number of years due to an "Eric E." being in my same class. 

As with most problems like this, I turned to my kids for the solution. During volleyball practice, I asked a group of students how they tell the three Sakis apart when they talk about them. For such a difficult question, it didn't take them long to catch on to my meaning. They explained (mostly in Japanese) that for them the Saki who played volleyball was simply "Saki" while the other two were "Kendo-bu Saki" and "Tennis-bu Saki" (bu is a suffix meaning "division" or "club"). Apparently this is pretty common practice in Japan, even extending to one's professional life. If there are two people with the same name, you affix their division or job title as a sort of prefix.

Mahjong-bu Saki

It took a little getting used to, especially since the students who were in the same club usually dropped the prefix, but it eventually became second nature to use this style of name differentiation.