This happened to me after I'd been teaching about 10 or 11 years, so I really should have known better.
At the beginning of school each year, one of the things I always asked my students is what name they preferred to be called. Now, I refused any ridiculous nicknames like "Bowtie" and "Spaghetti-o," but there were often kids who went by shortened versions of their names (Bill instead of William) or their middle names, or even initials.
I was going around the room in my advanced 9th grade English class asking what name they wanted me to call them, and this one boy tells me to call him "Dan." Well, his name was Peter James, so I thought...that's weird. Just to check, I looked around the room. No one was smirking or grinning or laughing. I asked them, just to make sure. They nodded. "Yes, that's what we call him," one girl told me. "It's a family name." Okay. Not impossible. My brother's nickname is Jordy but his given name is Jonathan Reginald S. III.
All year, I called him Dan. He always answered. No one laughed. For the next three years, whenever I saw him in the hall, I called him Dan. He always responded politely. I did hear other teachers call him Peter occasionally, but that always happens when students go by nicknames or middle names. Some teachers just refuse to call them anything but their first name. Or they don't bother to ask. (I think you can see where this is going.)
A couple of years after he had graduated, I saw him in a local grocery store and walked up to him to speak. I greeted him as Dan. He grimaced, shook his head, and told me, "You know, that was just a joke for the first day of school. No one else ever calls me Dan."
No shit.
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