Conflict is inevitable in a classroom. It’s a small space with 30 students and a teacher trying to teach while maintaining order. Sometimes, students will get on the teacher’s bad side over minor things. I found myself in one of these conflicts back in junior high.
I attended Lakewood Junior High, which had great teachers, and I genuinely enjoyed my three years there. Now and then, I would get a little full of myself and cause unnecessary trouble—but this wasn’t one of those times. In this case, the blame fell squarely on the teacher.
Our English teacher had a strict rule: she always used students’ formal names. I understood why she thought it was important, and in today’s climate, it might be even trickier to enforce, but she was adamant about it.
Every day in class, she called me “Randal Mills.” Now, that’s a nice, formal version of my name. She could have gone with “Randolph,” but she settled on “Randal.” The thing is, my name wasn’t Randal—it was Randy. I spent the first few weeks of the year asking her to call me Randy instead. Looking back, I imagine she had a printed list of our names and must have seen that mine was Randy. But at the time, I was fighting an uphill battle. After repeatedly asking, I even tried explaining that there was no formal version of my name. I thought I had been reasonable, but she wouldn’t budge.
So, I decided to take a different approach. I simply stopped responding when she called me Randal. In junior high, attendance was done by hand—teachers marked it, placed it in a holder outside the classroom, and it was picked up every period. My little protest meant she had to go to the office later and correct the attendance when she realized I had been present. After a few times, her frustration grew. She started demanding to know why I wasn’t answering when she called my name. My response? “Because you’re not calling my name.”
You can see how this could escalate quickly.
After a few days of this back-and-forth, she lost her patience and marched me to the Assistant Principal’s office. She launched into a tirade about how I was being disrespectful and ignoring her in class. The administrator, staying calm, asked me why I was being so difficult. I simply repeated, “She’s not calling me by my name.”
That set her off again, but to her credit, the administrator asked what I meant. I explained that my name was Randy, but she insisted on calling me Randal—which was not my name. The teacher tried to argue, but the administrator decided to check. She left, returned with my records, and there it was—on my birth certificate—my name was, in fact, Randy.
The best part? The administrator made the teacher apologize.
From that point on, we had an unspoken truce. And as the year went on, we became friends and had a great relationship.
Fast forward more than 50 years and name-related conflicts still happen in schools. But there’s one key difference: I wasn’t disrespectful—I just ignored her. I never held a grudge; I just wanted my name to be honored. Once that happened, everything was fine. I never used the incident as leverage or held it over her head. It was simply about respect.