By Paul L. Thonas, Ed.D. | Originally Published at The Becoming Radical. April 2, 2014
children guessed (but only a few)

and down they forgot as up they grew
“[anyone lived in a pretty how town],” e.e. cummings
In one of those early years of becoming and being a teacher, when I was still teaching in the exact room where I had been a student (a school building that would eventually be almost entirely destroyed by a fire set by children), it was the first day of school, and I was calling that first roll—a sort of silly but important ritual of schooling for teachers and students.
Toward the back of the room and slightly to my left sat a big young man, a white male student typical of this rural upstate South Carolina high school in my home town; like me, he would accurately be considered in that context as a Redneck.
Just about everyone knows everyone in my hometown, and we are very familiar with the common names of that town. So when I came to this young man’s name—Billy Laughter (it rhymes with “slaughter”)—I said “Billy Laughter” (rhyming the last name with “after”).
Smiling, I scanned the room and then turned my eyes back to Billy; he was red-faced and on the edge of having a very bad first day, one that was likely going to result in his being punished for my having done a very stupid thing. I raised my hand, palm facing him, and said, “Billy, my mistake. I’m sorry. I was trying to be funny but it wasn’t.” And then I said his name correctly.
Billy had suffered a life of people mangling his name, and he wasn’t in any mood for my being clever on the first day of school.
Several years laters, when I was teaching a U.S. history class as part of my usual load as a member and chair of the English department, while I was having students form small groups, two young white males bumped