There has been a lot of debate in the last few days, surrounding whether or not teachers should be addressed by their first names, with titles such as Miss or Sir abolished.
It's been argued that calling male teachers Sir, and females Miss is damaging. Jennifer Coates, emeritus professor of English language and linguistics at Roehampton University, said there was no place for the titles in the 21st century.
“It’s a depressing example of how women are given low status and men, no matter how young or new in the job they are, are given high status,” she told the TES.
“Sir is a knight. There weren’t women knights, but ‘Miss’ is ridiculous: it doesn’t match ‘Sir’ at all. It’s just one of the names you can call an unmarried woman.”
At LearnThruMusic, we like to promote progressive work spaces where teachers and students are partners in learning. This can be achieved by addressing teachers by their first names - a point Prof Sara Mills, from the Humanities Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, agrees with.
She said: “Sometimes teachers find that they can control students more when they try to stress the similarities between them, rather than trying to keep as distant as possible.”
You can find the full Telegraph article here; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10827710/Stop-calling-teachers-Miss-or-Sir-pupils-are-told.html
If this sounds like the kinf of learning for your school, we run workshops with schools in our LearnThruMusic courses.
http://www.learnthrumusiccourses.co.uk
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