I use a memo on my phone to jot down names and short descriptions of people I've met just to keep track.
Teaching people is for suckers but I have spent much of the past year at SLACs and literally every person there says the professors always know your name.
I'm very bad with names, but I used to be better at student names because we had a place on our "learning management system" with all the student names next to their photos. But then the university decided to save money by having students take and upload their own photos, and now it's utterly useless because most of the students don't have photos and half the ones that do have photos that are completely useless anyway (low quality, prom, zoomed too far out, etc.). It's infuriating.
That said, when I teach small undergrad classes I have groupwork and then I learn their names even without the photos.
Small colleges all want you to know the same things: the average class size and that the professors know everyone's name. Larger universities are more varied. Some of them want you to know where the polio vaccine was developed and some of them want you to know where the speed of light was proved to be a constant.
If the professor can't remember names, the least they can do is come up with endearing nicknames based on the students' appearance.
3, 5: you've been on campus tours where they are selling you on their merits, correct?
Right. The "teaching people is for suckers" is my own opinion though.
6: Or making them wear different color hats.
Unless there are issues with head lice, you could have the class leader get a yellow hat and have other colors for other standings. Kind of like the Tour de France does, except hat size varies less than jersey size.
3: every person there says the professors always know your name
Not even a little bit creepy.
Maybe it was more "always learn your name"?
Anyway, I agree with the OP. Unless there's an exemption for math because of known issues with the interpersonal skills of math teachers.
It's also such a selling point for slacs! My professor knew my name! So unlike Big U!
My professors knew my name even at a big state school. At least in my major and in honors classes.
ogged is out looking for Kate Middleton.
I once had a professor who, on the first day of class, started calling on the students (who were in unassigned seats) by name, and then further showed off that he had memorized not only names and faces, but all the other information available in the school facebook. A student (who he had never before met) would raise their hand, and he'd call on them as "oh yes, Ms. JMS. B.A. English Literature, Pleasant State University, I believe? Did you have a comment?" There were about 100 students, so this was no mean feat.
We were all suitably impressed, but over the course of the semester his memory started to flag, and shortly before Thanksgiving break, there was a day when he called one Black student by another Black student's name, and then one South Asian student by another South Asian student's name, and on down the line.
He visibly panicked, and basically turned into a pile of crumbs before our eyes. It turns out that a few years before, at the end of the school year, it had become clear to a seminar class that not only did he not know the names of most of the students in the (very small) class, but he was mixing up all the students of color. So after that he had made an effort to learn all the students' names before class even started, by committing the facebook to memory. It was a neat trick while it worked. Poor guy, he looked like wanted to kill himself.
I used to be able to use FB to help learn my students' names, but now most of them aren't on it, or if they are, don't have current pictures. I pass around a roll every and use it as a cheat sheet but EVEN so this is my nemesis as a teacher.
Definitely one of my greatest fears is mixing up kids of a given race. Besides white.
I mix up white guys a lot...
Elon Musk is afraid of race mixing too.
That's a fine point, Herbie-Jorbie.
had a couple of adorable & v young (young in years & even younger in all other ways, just like little peach fuzzy babies) e asian immigrant girls one year on the mock trial team, working v hard on their english & giggling. & also that year two junior associates coaching, both pale freckled incipient balding white guys in glasses, also v good pals, so so similar *except* one was at least 8" shorter than the other. in the course of the end of season party it became totally apparent that the girls not only couldn't keep the two coaches names straight but they actually struggled to differentiate between them as people. being dumped into an overwhelmingly unfamiliar environment & having to function under pressure in a completely unfamiliar language will really, really mess with your ability to notice super obvious differences between humans - something as a species we are usually really good at. also everyone found this super hilarious & good naturedly ribbed all involved, whereas the kids on the team were absolutely unflinchingly harsh on any coaches who didn't put in the effort to differentiate among the kids. after about week three of the season if a coach slipped up & mixed up two kids of a similar background there was swift blowback from allllll sides, they were not having it.
My main value-add in my day job is that we built and maintain the tool that surfaces student photos next to names in the "learning management system." I'm surprised the self-submitted photo policy (which we also have) has led to such bad results in 4. Our students are really good at selfies.
My finding is that many students are great at taking selfies that look pretty good but not necessarily very much like the way they look in person/motion, while the official photos are great at not looking particularly cute and *also* not very much like the student actually looks, especially after a couple of years have passed. What I wish for, though, is a roster view where you can see the whole class on the same page while also seeing their photos next to their names. Currently we have two options: the whole-class list view, which is text only, or "include photos in list," which actually lets you look only at one student at a time.
a couple of adorable & v young (young in years & even younger in all other ways, just like little peach fuzzy babies) e asian immigrant girls
I'm just going to disinfect my monitor sixteen or seventeen times after it displayed this little gem
That's an absurd layout. Your uni should call me, I'll give them the friend rate.
Student's faces are hard! Recognizing differences in faces among ethnic groups with which one isn't overly familiar is hard!* Recognizing people that you know vaguely from one context in another is also hard!** The course management system pulls from their ID pictures which are usually from their first semester. As students not only age, but change their looks a lot in college, they're useless. Student selfies are great if you want to know what they did on their vacation, or their kids, or their anime avatar, but not so much for faces. And wearing hats all semester doesn't help, and God help me if they change seats.
*Yes, it's a microaggression, but this is also legit a cognitively hard thing to fix quickly.
**Another faculty here looks a little like me, and we have a kid the same age, and the kids are friends, and people got us mixed up at her kid's birthday party.
You need to have them wear color coded hats.
Anyway, the OP says only that you need to learn kids names if you teach at a SLAC. Otherwise, probably doesn't matter.
Anyway, the good news is that I'm probably going to have to visit another SLAC or two this month.