It's disappointing to know that this still goes on: When you have a name people say is 'too hard':
Like many students with a non-English name, illustrator Hingyi Khong and I vividly recall the anxiety and awkward pause before teachers called out our names on the school roll.
"A former high school English teacher once shortened my name to a single H for an entire year," Khong says.
Half a century ago when I was at school, one of my classmates had Yagodzenski as her last name. Teachers would stumble over it and end up on "Yag". It wasn't even hard — you just had to ignore the "z".