Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is trying to learn his students’ names:
I have students sitting at tables (in this class and in labs). As they are working on something, I go around and write down who is sitting where. Yes, this means that you have to actually ask each student what their names is (I hate that part). After I have a “seating chart” I just keep practicing while they are working. If a student talks to me, I make sure and use their name. I will look it up on the seating chart if I have to. This just takes a couple of class times of practice till I have them all (well, most of them) memorized. There are always a couple of students that I just can’t get.
I’m always amazed at how well the “seating chart” thing works. I don’t need to assign seats, mind– that’s a little too elementary school for my tastes. But even without formally assigning seats, students always tend to sit in the same places, enough so that it’s a good way to learn names– “John Smith: Red Sox hat, sits in the back left; Jim Jones: Yankee hat, back right;…” (Hats are usually more or less constant, as well, to the point where I don’t recognize some students without them.)
This is a life-saver, because I’m terrible with names. There are people who work here whose names I can never remember, even though I run into them regularly around campus. I live in terror of having to introduce people to each other.
Rhett has a couple of other suggestions, including using student pictures. He said it was a hassle to get those at his institution, but here, they’re provided to us. The web-based course roster system we have includes the students’ ID photos with their names.
This turns out to be less useful than you might think. Or, rather, it works well, but only for the intro classes. The problem is that student ID pictures are taken once, at the start of their first year. As long as you’re teaching a class with mostly first-year students, they look enough like their ID pictures for the photo rosters to be useful.
By the time they’re juniors or seniors, though, it’s remarkable how many of the students look nothing at all like their first-year pictures. It’s not terribly surprising– people change a lot between 18 and 20, after all– but it’s a dramatic demonstration of just how much college students change over the years. The clean-cut, well-groomed students who showed up that first September have gained weight, grown facial hair, and developed radically different hairstyles.
Happily, the only classes I teach that are senior-heavy tend to be classes in the physics major, and by the time they’re senior majors, I’ve seen those students around enough to know their names. At which point, the ID photos on the rosters are more for entertainment value than anything else.