Wat’s my name??

This blog is about a boy, who was a first grader at a school, where I worked as a teacher for 8 months. Like all children, he was cute, smile as sweet as candy (now tell me is there anything sweeter than candy that I can compare his smile to?) and his hair as straight as a porcupine’s needle. He enjoyed his classes, so long as nobody asked him to spell his name. Yeah, as luck would have it his parents had named him ‘Harshamithran’. A name so long, that the letters started to dance in front of his eyes, like we all saw in the movie ‘Tare Zameen Par’. No, this boy was not dyslexic. Here he was trying to learn spellings, like bird, plant, tree etc, in his class lessons, but by default was expected to know how to spell HARSHAMITHRAN!!!! Phew, I myself take a breather every time I finish spelling that name, so can we blame that poor boy?? Harsha never could take one, because in every other class, the technique of practice was activity sheets, work sheets etc where one started by writing their name (so that the teachers can identify the work with the student). So everytime these sheets were distributed in class, it would be just minutes before I see this boy standing right next to my table. His motive??? Well all I can say is that he hoped I would help him in his mission impossible, i.e. to spell his name!!!! And I like any other teacher would tell him, “try spelling it out on your own, and I’ll correct you if you go wrong.” Thus Harsha would start this game we played everytime he had to spell his name. He always seemed confident about the first 3 - 4 letters. It was after the ‘sha’ that the trouble normally began. He would then try guessing which letter would follow. Luckily for me he knew which letters formed his name. So instead of guessing all the 26 letters, he always guessed from the 13 letters of his name!!! “r?”, ( which more or less would b pronounced like rrrrrrrr) he would ask. If I nodded a no, he would proceed to another letter until I nodded a yes. In the same fashion he would continue to guess the rest of the letters with his ‘m’ sounding more like ‘yum’, ‘a’ sounding like ‘ye’, ‘h’ like ‘hech’ and so on. Once he has finished spelling his name, the rest of the activity seemed much simpler to him. Well so that is the story of Harshamithran, for whom more than his studies, his very own name was a nightmare.