How do you want to be addressed, Ate.

Filipino customs and traditions dictate that we address anyone older than us, people we deemed to have high social status, strangers and family with terms of respect. We call members of our family with whatever is deemed appropriate, taking into account rank in the family, dialect used inside the family, etc.

In a more formal setting I call strangers Ma'am, Miss and Sir. I never call anyone Ate unless invited to do so in as much as I never want to be called ate because it is an intimate term to me, a term that signify friendship and trust.

In our university, the people handling the dormitories are encouraging the students to call them ate's and kuya's. It's appropriate because they are after all dealing with student security and comfort.

However, the custom has spread out to other offices. Older clerks (of retirable age), professors and phd's unknown to some students are called ate's and kuya's. Maybe they don't mind. But I do because it always evokes in me a feeling of intimacy which neither I wish nor have with any students. Being called ate makes me feel like lecturing and hectoring students about proper behavior which if I do would just get me another nasty title, that of an interfering librarian.

There are some instructors who encouraged their students to call them by their first names. I rather prefer this kind of practice; it is more egalitarian, more in tune with a university setting, supposedly liberal. Maybe their is a contradiction here somewhere, but my point is the intimacy of the term. It makes the hairs on my nape rise, every time.