The Dean Dad takes a question from a reader on a topic of perpetual interest:
How do other teachers remember their students’ names? I confess, I am AWFUL with names. My wife and I have gone to the same small church for 20 years and I still go blank on names of people we’ve been friends with for all that time. (“you know who I mean honey, the tall guy who always wears that corduroy jacket. His wife is in the choir. You mean Tom? yeah, Tom!”)
This is a real difficulty for me in the classroom, even with a light teaching load. I have one class this semester (I am an adjunct) and only 32 students and it’s still a problem. In every class some students stand out, for both good reasons and bad. The one who does all the readings and asks questions is easy to remember, as is the goof-off who texts in class on those rare occasions he manages to stay awake. It’s the middle 80% that I struggle with.
I make little cryptic notes on my roster when I call roll (WPSwt=always wear pink sweats to class) but that only helps so much and I have to be careful not to make observations that might be interpreted as inappropriate. I can’t see assigning seats in a college classroom, and it’d be a royal pain to enforce. Name tags seem excessive. I talk to students before class and that helps some, but so many of them rush in at the last second.
I struggle with names myself, though I’m frequently bailed out by the tendency of our students to self-organize. I’ve never assigned seats in a class (other than occasionally insisting that students spread out a bit on exam days), but in my experience, students tend to sit in more or less the same place every day, without being told to. This is a godsend when I have to learn names.
The post also raises another issue related to name-learning:
I even considered copying a method that I saw in the movie “The Paper Chase” where the professor put little photos (headshots) next to the students name on a seating chart. However, it seemed a little creepy for a 50-ish professor to ask students for their photos, especially as my class enrollment is a good 75% female.
I thought about trying to schedule a time to meet with each of them individually. Would that make me look like I’m one of those teachers who is trying to be their “buddy” and not their teacher? I don’t want that. Nor do I want to look like a weird middle-aged male professor trying to meet with his female students alone.
I dodge the picture-taking bullet thanks to our course roster system, which automatically puts the student’s ID pictures on the roster page. I print that out on the first day of class, and use it to help with getting names down.
The only problem is that the pictures on the roster pages are from ID photos taken in the first week that students are on campus. That means that the pictures become dramatically less useful as time goes by, especially for male students, who are likely to grow their hair out or experiment with facial hair at some point in their career. The pictures work really well for intro classes, though.
I do have colleagues who take a class picture at the start of class (usually a group photo, rather than a series of individual head shots), and use that to help with names. I’ve never done that, though more from laziness than fear of seeming creepy. Now that it’s mentioned, though, it does seem like one of those innocent-in-intent, creepy-in-practice actions that are a constant source of worry (I’m not really comfortable meeting one-on-one with students– male or female– in my office with the door closed).
(Of course, anything and everything is a source of worry for low-rank faculty. I’ve worried about seeming creepy because I took longer to learn the names of my female students (in a pre-med class where three-quarters of the class were women, and the three male students could not have looked more different), and I’ve worried about seeming creepy because I got the names of the female students down more quickly than the males (in an intro mechanics class that was pretty much the demographic mirror image of the pre-med class). Such worries are nearly always overblown, but that’s the culture we’re stuck with at the moment.)
If you know any good tricks for learning student names without appearing skeevey, leave ’em in the comments.