Question: I like to have an informal classroom where students get to know each other, share ideas, and make friends. Ours is a huge, impersonal university, and I like them to know that I care.
But I keep getting older, while the students stay the same age, except for a few over-25 outliers. I’m having more and more trouble learning their names, even though they’re not all Jennifer and Michael anymore. And I’m not old enough to get away with calling everyone “Bubba” or “Darlin’.”
Meanwhile, they all look alike. The young women have straight brown hair (blonde is going out, I’m told). The men have short, spiky brown hair. This isn’t a big tattoo or nose-ring place (everyone wants to go to dental school), and most wear blue or black. Sometimes it looks like a reunion of Steve Jobs fans, all in black turtlenecks and blue jeans.
I hate to think I’m losing it already. Do you have some tricks for learning their names?
Answer: Ms. Mentor reminds you that academicians, who have too much knowledge of dire consequences, always assume dementia. Or, failing that, you imagine that your students are conspiring to drive you insane. Of course you do know, with your rational side, that they’re dressing to impress their peers. It’s not about you. It just seems to be.
It’s also highly unlikely that you have prosopagnosia, or “face blindness,” a genuine inability to remember faces. The writer-neurologist Oliver Sacks, a sufferer, has written about it with his usual grace in The Mind’s Eye (2010). It’s an extremely rare condition.
Most likely, you’ve just become acutely aware that young people dress in herds. The macho individualists of the 1960s thought they were all distinctively rebellious, hairy, and furry—but their group shots now look like congregations of bears. College women used to have huge Afros or ironed-straight manes—but now their descendants look like coiffed and burnished pop stars. And now, more and more young men shave their heads (“eggheaded androids,” hisses a curmudgeon Ms. Mentor knows).
You can, of course, blithely “not bother” to learn students’ names. Many of them don’t learn yours, according to the frequent complaints of instructors in The Chronicle’s forums. Some students act as if their teacher is some kind of TV-type personality: He struts and frets his hour upon the stage, yammering and gesticulating, and then is heard no more.
Ms. Mentor believes that you should learn your students’ names, and urge them to learn yours. Write yours on blackboards, on PowerPoints, on syllabi and study guides and problem sets. If it suits your grandiose teaching personality, refer to yourself in the third person: “Professor Gantry, whose judgments are unimpeachable, has always preferred Harding over Coolidge. Professor Gantry, who stands before you in all his glory, is not amused by fools who think otherwise.”
Learning names is a polite and gentle way to defuse some of the nastiness in our barbarous times. It is harder to tweet viciously about someone you know. But how do you learn those names and show students a glimpse of the gracious life of academe?
Ms. Mentor asked her panel of experts to brainstorm and advise her correspondent. What are their tricks for learning names?
Ms. Mentor’s consultant “Alvin” wants to require all students to tattoo their names in henna on their foreheads. Alvin assures Ms. Mentor that hennaed students will joyfully recognize each other anywhere, in bonhomie and camaraderie. Everyone will know their names. World peace will ensue.
It may be easier for you to assign seats, with a chart. That will comfort those students who always choose the same seat, anyway, and sometimes get downright testy and territorial: “That’s my chair you’re in, dude.”
Once “Bonita,” another consultant, has a seating chart, she takes pictures of each student and makes a collage as a class photo. The 8 a.m. class is often appalled by what they look like in the morning. Some students make profound grooming changes.
Ms. Mentor’s consultant “Chester” recommends name tags, strung around the neck. “Danita” likes name plates, or “little homemade signs that students put in front of them on the desk, in BIG LETTERS.”
Or you can follow the daring practice of “Edwin": Give each student a colorful, memorable name in your mind, or in coded notes. Edwin claims he never, ever blurts out what’s in his thoughts—but Ms. Mentor wonders. It would be embarrassing enough to call on “Mighty Eyebrows” when you meant to say “G. Marx.” But what if you blurt out “Vapid Glances” or “Super Geek”?
Ms. Mentor thinks you ought not to risk that.
It’s simpler to have students control their own images—spin their own names. They can give themselves alliterative nicknames, with an adjective and first name, such as “Marvelous Ms. Mentor.” Elementary-school teachers advise children to make their adjectives esteem-building: Intelligent Ida, Talented Teddy.
Or you could pair up students, have them chat a bit, and then introduce one another to the class—with perhaps a few guidelines about civility, and some models. “This is Mabel from Utica, and she plays the violin” might be better than “This is Harry. He doesn’t do anything except play video games.” Or “This is Sally. She sure likes to bowl.”
You can have students recite the names of the people next to them or reel off all the names they’ve heard. Or write a little bit about themselves on cards. You know you’ll want to connect the “pastry chef” with the face of that particular student.
Learning names can be done. Concentrate, study, and repeat. Notice how students stand, sit, and move. All of that is useful human knowledge. But some cases are truly intractable—the times when students are totally, awesomely, fashionable.
“Joel,” for instance, found there were five blonde students, all wearing Prada glasses, in his section of Art History 101. Joel and one of the students happened to be walking across the campus in the same direction, and Joel chatted amiably about the paintings they’d just seen in class. (“I can make this student feel specially tutored,” Joel congratulated himself.)
Joel was wise, witty, and confiding until the student interrupted him and said: “I don’t know who the hell you are. I’m a math major, and I wouldn’t ever take an art history course. No way. Ugh.”
The student flounced away, but Joel had a flash of insight that made him laugh. He had no idea who the student was, either. There was no way they’d ever have another embarrassing run-in.
For one thing, they were both such common types. She was a burnished blond undergraduate. He was an egg-bald art-history professor. They’d never recognize each other. And best of all, they didn’t know each other’s names.
Question: I’m on the job market, looking for an edge. Should I try to show my coolness by friending search-committee members on Facebook, or will that seem a grossly uncouth invasion of privacy that ought to be swatted away?
Answer: Uncouth.
Sage readers: Ms. Mentor will soon be inviting new nominations for “Ackies,” awards for the best academic novels for summer reading. She invites readers to consult last year’s column, and consider what may be missing. Winning tomes needn’t be newly published, but new titles are especially welcome.
As always, Ms. Mentor invites queries, gossip, and rants. Springtime in academe is always fertile. Ms. Mentor can rarely respond personally or speedily, but confidentiality is guaranteed for items used in her columns, and identifying details are always masked. No one will know your name, and Ms. Mentor will forget it, too.
(c) Emily Toth. All rights reserved
