Excuse Me, Miss?

I am a university professor, a female university professor - who regularly teaches first year students. I love my job…and my students, most of the time. Yet, I must say that there is one particular habit of the students that really bugs me. My students almost always call me ‘Miss’.

I got my doctorate in 2012, and have been teaching at the university level ever since. I am one of the lucky ones, and I totally know it. Jobs are scarce and I look at my colleagues who have been working as adjuncts for decades and I realize that I am totally and utterly privileged to be in this position.

So, here is where the trouble comes in. Students in high school tend to call their female teachers ‘Miss’ and their male teachers ‘Sir’, and that’s totally fine. If that’s what the standard is, I get it, and regardless about how you feel about this binary gendered system, it’s really just the way it is, but I digress.

I teach many foundational first year classes, because generally first year students are awesome. They are interesting, focused, and enthusiastic in a way that 4th year students aren’t. In the first lecture of pretty much all of my classes, we go over course expectations. I spend time going through the syllabus, highlighting what we will be working on throughout the year, the assignments, the due dates, and the course expectations. When I get to the communication policy aspects in my syllabus, I stop and explicitly explain to them that they should use the titles ‘Professor’ or ‘Dr.’ when referring to me. I tell them that this is true for most professors at the university, and then I tell them they should not, ever, call me ‘Miss’. I explain why I don’t like it and why I would prefer they use the correct title, basically attributing it to a high school strategy. I am not a teacher, but a professor, and would like to be addressed as such.

Without fail, by the end of the syllabus, when I ask, “do you have any questions?”, some student pipes up and says ‘Excuse me, Miss?’ Of course, I answer their question, without any sort of condescension in front of the class. I would never want to make a student feel uncomfortable, as I want them to feel like they can communicate with me. Yet, time after time, students call me ‘Miss’ and when they write their emails to me (another skill that we practice in my first year foundational courses), they write Dear Miss… Sometimes I clarify this, gently, with students after answering their question, but I sort of wish they would have just listened to me in the first place.

I was recounting this story to my colleague, who happens to be male, around the same age as me and he says that the students rarely call him ‘Sir’ and almost always use ‘Professor’. This just irritates me even more.

So, I thought, ok, I’ll change my strategy. I’ll change my communication policy so that students can call me by my first name. I don’t consider myself to be pretentious (though perhaps, upon reflection, I am a little). I really just don’t like the title ‘Miss’. So, I told students to call me by my first name. I explain, ‘we are all adults, and I encourage you to use my name when you communicate with me’. I continue going through the syllabus… assignments, due dates, and so on.

Upon completion of my syllabus, I get to the end and ask, are there any questions, only to be met with, ‘Excuse me, Miss?’