It’s not unusual to mispronounce someone’s name or title by accident, and while no harm may be intended, more caution should be taken when addressing college professors and their titles.

Remember as a kid when the teacher mispronounced your name on the first day of school?

You were likely embarrassed as the other kids laughed under their breath, and you were probably frustrated with the teacher for making you feel like a fool.

On the other hand, how do you think a college professor feels when students address them by the wrong title?

Most people have heard the famous saying, “Take a walk in my shoes and see how I feel.” In other words, you can’t relate to someone when you haven’t had the same experiences as them.

The reason it’s hard for students to understand why college professors take their title as “Dr.” so seriously is because it’s difficult to imagine the many years of work they put into getting their PhD.

However, while students have made a habit of addressing their professors by the wrong title, they don’t do it on purpose.

In elementary school, middle school and high school, we were trained to refer to our teachers as Mr., Mrs. or Miss.

After over a decade of referring to them that way, it’s obvious why it’s so difficult to make the transition to “Dr.” in college.

While this is a valid point, it should not excuse the respect that is due to professors.

They have worked hard for their degrees and deserve to be called by the name they worked so long to earn.

According to globalpost.com, a doctorate is attained quickly in four to five years, but usually takes seven to nine years to earn.

Undergraduate students struggle enough as it is to make it through four years for a bachelor’s degree, and the thought of going to school any longer than that is dreadful for most to think about.

For this reason, professors are more than deserving of being addressed as “Dr.”

However, there should be a level of understanding on both sides.

It’s important that students address their professors as “Dr.”, but professors should also be patient and understanding with students if they happen to address them incorrectly.

While there are students who forget, there are some students who simply don’t know what to call their professors.

Professors should politely correct their students, and the students should make a strong effort to remember from that point on.

If you want to know the proper way to address your professor, go to them personally and ask them what they prefer to be called.

This will prevent any misunderstanding and will ensure that you are addressing them the right way.

So before you let, “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, or “Miss” roll off your tongue again, remember that first day of school when you were a kid, and save yourself and your professor the embarrassment.

Religion can be spoken about freely, yet we tread softly when publically mentioning it.

But, the hardest idea to grasp is that having the right to spread religious awareness is certainly not the same as pushing beliefs on others.

While people reserve the right to practice religious freedom and to speak without restraint about any faith they choose, forcing others to listen isn’t freedom of speech; it’s harassment.

There are over 127 major religions and seven billion people on earth with seven billion different views of God. Some love Him, some fear Him, some question His existence and some are still searching for Him.

Some will decide that God plays no role in the trials and tribulations of life, while others will find faith the moment they see their newborn child take the first breath of being.

Whether we discover where we spiritually belong in a pew on Sunday morning or on a lonely drive with no destination, the journey to finding or forgetting God is what determines our views. We can’t be told what and who to believe in, or to even believe in anything at all.

What we learn, who we meet and the challenges we face are what we remember when we stand before Him, not the church members that knock on our front doors, or the people that stand in the quad condemning us all to hell.

And if the church goer at your front door changes your perspective, let them. Be baptized in one church, change your mind, and be baptized in another. Let what you learned in biology class make you question evolution and the powers above.

Learning from life experiences and questioning God’s ways isn’t sin; it’s human. It’s human to change emotionally, mentally, and spiritually when physical surroundings change. It’s human to simply be curious and indecisive.

Faith only exists because there are people that believe strongly enough in it to make it a reality and a way of life. Without doubters and differences, the strength of religion would never have anything to be measured against.

Because of that, religion without true belief is weak.

Never practice out of habit, don’t follow just because your parents or friends do, and don’t ever think one religion is superior to another. In a time that seems to have the explanation for everything in a test tube or on a database, people believing in any God at all is a miracle in itself.