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.
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I face that same problem, but currently being involved in high school education I have between 120 and 200 students per year. Not to mention the students who are not in my classes but are good to know for the sake of hallway management.
The temptation is to use tricks to avoid needing to know the names. This is exactly the wrong thing to do. I know at times you may want to avoid letting the students know you don't know their names, but this only prolongs the problem. You should try to confront the situation as often as possible. Call on students by name instead of just pointing (if you don't know the name, ask). If you have assignments or tests hand them back individually instead of having the students pick them up. Basically confront the issue as often as possible (even if you have to go out of your way and feel awkward) instead of trying to avoid or mask the situation.
There are really no tricks (none I know of anyway). Be upfront with the students about your problem remembering names, and make it an ongoing effort.
A trick one of my freshman recitation instructors used: Call a name picked at random from the roster and see who answers. Still a bit awkward, so I don't know if this will work any better for you than what you're currently doing.
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
At the end of the first class for which I was a TA (intro mechanics for science and engineering majors; the students were a mix of freshmen and sophomores), the professor distributed a survey questionnaire which asked the students for their gender, class year, and lab section. He shared those questionnaires with the TAs. I informed him that including all three of those questions was not a good idea, because I could identify all of the females in my lab sections (there were two out of 20 in each of my sections) from the answers to those questions.
I find that I can't remember names when all I have is a name and a face that I have to associate together. But, when I add something else, they all stick. (Think of those extra facts like neutrons holding things together.) I ask people to give me one detail about themselves that I don't know, and suddenly, I can remember their names. It doesn't matter what the detail is, but once you tell me that you play the bassoon, or water ski barefoot, I can suddenly remember your name.
When TAing classes, I would use this individually with students whose names I still couldn't remember after a few weeks. Other times, I've just done it right at the beginning with the whole group.
I had a philosophy prof who instituted a pretty good system. At the beginning of every semester, he told people he was bad with names, and we were asked, when we raised our hand, to preface each question or comment with our name. Then, as he learned the named, he'd call on your BY name so both people knew he knew the name. By about the fourth week he usually had everyone but the quietest people down. And it really encouraged people to speak in class, and didn't seem at all creepy.
I go for the spatial data
http://blog.dotphys.net/2009/01/learning-student-names/
David Starr Jordan, the renowned ichthyologist who was also Stanford's first president, complained that "every time I remember the name of a student I forget the name of a fish."
I do picture-day. (With 40+ students per section, that's my only hope.) I study the pictures until I can remember the names that go with them, then I delete them from my hard drive.
None of my students have reacted as though being photographed by me is creepy -- I don't know if this is because I'm a woman (or I don't set off their stalker bells or whatever). Indeed, the overwhelming reaction on picture day is that they're pleasantly surprised that a professor is interested in learning their names at all.
One of my professors (Gallardo) in a College of Education did this. On the first day of class, he went around the room, roww-by-row of desks. Each student in their turn stated: (1) Their first name; (2) something they like; (3) where they're from or what else they've done besides teach.
Then, after N students have done this, the teacher repeats from memory, what each of the first N people have said, with pauses so that the class as a whole can call out what they remember. Then the N+1-th person reports their data. This is done until everyone has reported. Everyone in class has rehearsed, by "mushrooming" (i.e. growing a little bit each time what is rehearsed and learned).
Then he offers a cash prize (order of $10) for anyone in class who can correctly state all data on all students. Then he does it himself.
He recommends that this be done when one becomes a teacher or a more credentialed teacher, for those already teachers.
On the first day, he also has each student fill out an index card of more official data. About 15 minutes before the bell rings to start the class, he stands outside the door and greets each student as they arrive, by name, sorting the stack of index cards into those he's greeted and those not. This attendance has been taken before he steps into the classroom, and he's rehearsed the names again, and listened to whatever new personal information is volunteered by the arriving student.
@Dr. Free Ride,
I did the picture thing before, but clearly it felt awkward. I felt like a stalker or something. Maybe it was just me.
Why not state upfront that you're bad with names? I think a lot of people have the same problem and would find it perfectly normal that you want to e. g. take a group picture to help you memorize the names.
Maybe you could also ask the students to shortly introduce themselves at the first course day. IMO if you asked a student to take "head shots" at that occasion it wouldn't look creepy at all.
In some professional schools where I've taught, the tables in the classrooms have special grooves in them and each student gets a name card that they carry with them and insert into the slot in the front of their seat.
The instructor can see all the name cards and a typical student can see most of the name cards in the room (due to the fact that the seating arrangements are usually circular or semi-circular and the cards show the students' names on both front and back.) The classes are typically large, but the students typically learn one another's names pretty fast that way (as does the instructor.)
I would also take a videocamera and pan the rows of students all sitting behind their namecards. It's less stalkerish than taking individual photos, because I didn't pause very long on any one section of the classroom and nobody seemed to object--they appreciated that I was trying to learn names. Using the videocamera also took a lot less time than taking 80 or 90 individual photos.
I would also collect index cards from the students, asking them to write their names, their reasons for taking the class/what they hoped to get out of it, and "one interesting thing you'd like me to know about you." Since these were mid-career master's students from all over the world and from a wide variety of walks of life, the interesting things were VERY interesting! And I agree with the previous poster--it helps a lot to have that interesting fact. I also had the luxury of a secretary (50-50 shared with another faculty member) who cut and taped photos of the students from the Facebook (not the electronic one, the original paper one the school put out each year) to the back of the index cards. I fell asleep each night the first week of class with that video running on my television in the background as I quizzed myself on the flashcards. When I would run into a student that I thought I recognized in the hallway that first week, I would attempt to greet them by name: "Hello, there! You're Joe, right?" My batting average was pretty good, but even when I made mistakes in the first week, people gave me credit for trying. On the second day of class, I would tell all the students to temporarily put their cards down and I would go around the room and say as many names as I could remember. Usually, there would be one or two I would get wrong, but again, I would get credit for trying--and I would often redeem myself in such cases after they corrected me on their names, by being able to tell them immediately what their "interesting fact" about themselves was (if it was something generally benign and not terribly private, like "has run 10 marathons" or "former president of the sandhogs union." Sandhogs blast subway tunnels, by the way.)
It made a big difference in making an 80 student class much more personal.
Oh - I have two more ideas.
1) I remember one time an instructor passed out small little sheets and said "draw a picture of yourself" or "write something interesting about yourself". If someone writes "I am a cubs fan" you might remember that.
2) Our university has a database of student ID pictures. For some reason, we (faculty) don't get that data unless you have uber-permissions or something. I proposed (and was ignored) that online class rosters include pictures. It would help make the university seem friendlier. I suspect that most institutions have this data (student id photos)
Whenever I get a new class - teaching high school youngsters - I use the fist 20 minutes or so on a very extensive name round. Every person tell their name, I come up with a person sharing that name with them, that I already know, and then I tell the class a short story about my own relationsship to that person.
The class usually finds this amusing, and I find it much easier to associate them to a person/name I already know, than to make up a whole new relation. I get about 95-100% correct after first class. When the second class starts I'm down to 70%, but then it's only a matter of persistency. Like others before me have said - it never pays of to avoid saying names. At some point your scam is revealed, and it adds to the embarassment if it's after a whole semester.
At my undergraduate university the Physics department took head shots of all first-year students and made a handout (name + photo) for all departmental lecturers. They were required/heavily encouraged to take these to lectures and learn all the students names quickly.
Having it organised by the department takes the creepiness factor out :).
"I am terrible with names. I frequently misremember the names of colleagues I worked with for years, and meeting new people, like this, is frankly hopeless.
I want you to understand that I do recognize you, I do know you, and believe me, I remember what you do and say in class. I just can't put a name together with your face to save my life. To end my agony and limit the embarrassment, please just state your name whenever we meet and bit by bit it'll get pounded into my head."
I have the same problem, but from a different perspective. I'm a consultant, so I meet lots of new people very frequently. I may meet someone on a pursuit team, that I won't see again for maybe years - and since I'm a leader - they expect me to remember them.
My 'tricks' include all of the above.
Round table 'greet and meet' - learning something orthogonal to name/face.
Relating the name to the specifics of the project/role/client/city (I remember you - we worked on XYZ corp together in Podunk - you ran the foosbabble group!)
Using every opportunity in the first meeting to SAY THE NAME when addressing the person.
Taking Notes and referring back to the topic and the persons name as much as possible.
The latter come off as excruciatingly pedantic - but it seems to work.
Unfortunately -- it doesn't last forever (like Dr. Jordan, I seem to have a limited supply of 'name-slots'). I encountered an ex colleague on a flight recently, and kept missing opportunities to recall his name -- I asked, but the environment wasn't conducive to focus!)
I need a similar suite of tools for friends and neighbors. It took me three years to be able to remember the surname and first names of my next door neighbor! (Different mix of kids, different schools, different schedules mean we 'see' each other maybe twice a year at cookouts - and I try to make sure my wife is always on hand!)
Table tents with names on the front and back (so other students can see also) work great. Every professor I had that did that eventually learned all our names, even when he or she said he or she was bad with names.
Of course this might not help if you are so bad with names that you call Emmy Steelykid or vice versus on a regular basis. My father had trouble keeping the daughters and the cats straight, so no one else has a chance.
At the beginning of every term, I have students fill out index cards with information in a specific format that I put on the board; name at the top left, major, year in school, last book voluntarily read, a favorite movie. The combination of the basic data (associating a major with a name) and the quirky data (book/movie preferences) is helpful, especially when combined with each student's handwriting. I use the cards to take attendance as I learn names, and when students are slow to volunteer answering a question I shuffle the cards and ask a student at random. By the third week of using the cards with handwriting and personal quirks on them, I have all the names down pat.
I take attendance at the beginning of the semester. I find reading off the names each time helps me eventually learn them.