Do Kids Actually Have Weird Names? A Third Grade Teacher Shares What I’ve Learned
Late August, my classroom still smells like the lemon disinfectant the custodian sprayed over the weekend and the box of new crayons I opened that morning. I’m halfway through first-day roll call when I hit the name: Laif, L-A-I-F. “Life?” I say, squinting at the sheet. A boy in the back row named Javi snorts loud enough for everyone to hear. “That’s such a weird name,” he says, not even quiet enough to be out of earshot. The kid at the desk labeled Laif hunches his shoulders, pulls the brim of his baseball cap down over his eyes, and mumbles “here” so soft I barely catch it.
Zyra, in the front row, raises her hand immediately. She’s got purple glitter on her nails, and her name is spelled Z-Y-R-A—her mom emailed me ahead of time to confirm pronunciation, so I got it right that morning. “My name’s weird too,” she says, leaning forward. “No one else in my old school had it. So what.”
After roll call, we do our first-day activity: decorating construction paper name tags to set on their desks. When I walk around to check in, I notice Laif wrote “Lee” in tiny pencil in the bottom corner of his tag. I don’t say anything right then, just make a quiet note in my planner.
Over the 10 years I’ve taught third grade, I’ve heard this “weird name” comment a lot. It’s not just kids, either. Last year I chaperoned a field trip, and a parent volunteer leaned over to me while we waited in ticket line and said, “Can you believe how many weird names kids have these days? When I was growing up, everyone was a Mike or a Sarah.” I hear the same thing from grandparents at parent-teacher conferences, muttering about how these new names are just made up.
It makes me think of my own grandma, born in 1938. She told me once that when her aunt had a baby and named her Linda in 1941, the whole family thought it was a weird, made-up name. Now Linda is one of the most common names of that generation. What counts as weird is just whatever you didn’t grow up hearing. That’s all it ever is.
A couple weeks into this school year, I did the small name project I started a few years back to work through this tension. Everyone can bring one small thing that connects to their name, and if they want, they share the story for two minutes. It’s not a big graded assignment, just a quick way to get to know each other. Laif signed up to go last, I think because he was nervous. When it was his turn, he pulled a crumpled photo out of his pocket: a big, tree-lined trail next to a river. His parents love hiking, he said, and they got engaged on the Laffer Trail outside of Asheville. They liked the name so much they shortened it to Laif for him. “I’ve never met another Laif,” he said, shuffling his feet on the rug. “But it’s ours.”
After he finished talking, Javi—the same kid who called it weird the first day—raised his hand. “I go camping there every summer with my grandpa,” he said. “That trail has the best wild blueberry bushes. That’s a cool name, actually.”
That moment got me thinking about how we handle this, as teachers and parents. So many of the articles I see are either shaming parents for giving “out there” names or saying you just have to teach your kid to be proud and ignore the teasing. Neither of those works, from what I’ve seen.
What I do now, a small change that makes a big difference, is never guess at a name I’m not sure about during first-day roll call. I just say, “Help me out here, how do you say this?” If the kid wants to share a quick story right then, great. If not, we just move on. No big fuss that draws extra attention to the name being different. For parents, if your kid comes home from school saying someone called their name weird, don’t jump straight to “your name is beautiful, don’t let anyone get to you.” Instead, ask them “What do you want to do about it?” Some kids want to go by a shorter nickname at school, like Laif did with Lee, and that’s totally okay. It’s not a failure of your name choice if your kid wants an option. Some kids want to tell everyone the story, and some just want to vent about it and move on. Let them lead.
Another small shift: when a kid says “that’s weird” about another kid’s name, don’t just shut them down immediately with “that’s not nice.” If you do that, everyone in the room still thinks it’s weird, they just know not to say it out loud—which makes the kid with the different name feel even more self-conscious. Instead, just ask “What makes it feel weird to you?” Nine times out of ten, the answer is just “I’ve never heard it before.” That’s not mean, that’s just honest. Then you can turn to the kid whose name it is and ask “Do you want to share anything about it?” It takes the tension out right away.
Last week, I watched Laif and Javi playing four square at recess. Javi messed up a serve and yelled “Hey Laif, c’mon, that was my point!” Laif grinned and bounced the ball right back at him. Some days he introduces himself as Lee to new kids, some days he’s Laif. It shifts depending on how he feels that day, and that’s fine. We still get a new kid every year with a name no one’s heard before, and someone will always call it weird in the first week. But lately, more often than not, another kid will go “Wait, what’s the story behind your name?” before anyone gets uncomfortable.
It’s not a big, fancy solution. There are still days a kid will go home crying because someone teased them about their name. But at the end of the day, names aren’t weird. They’re just unfamiliar, until you know the person who has it.
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