When Students' Names Escape You
by
Source
The Law Teacher, Volume 4, number 2 (Spring 1997), p. 12.
About the Author
Rick Snell teaches at the University of Tasmania Law School, GPO Box 252-89, Hobart, Tasmania 7001 Australia; ph: 0011 61 3 62 26 2062; home phone: 0011 61 3 62 39 1140; fax 0011 61 3 62 26 7623; email r.snell [at] law.utas.edu.au. The role communication with students plays in learning is covered in works like Paul Ramsden, Learning to Teach in Higher Education (Routledge 1992) and M. LeBrun and R. Johnstone, The Quiet (R)evolution: Improving Student Learning In Law (Law Book Company 1994).
I have a major problem. I have great difficulty remembering names of students. I do have some retention capacity on my brain disk but it overloads after a capacity of about 30 names and faces.
This is a problem because in the course of a semester I will be teaching 300 to 400 different students in three or four different courses. I also will be encountering another 100 to 150 students I have taught in the previous two years in the corridors of the law school, in the library, or out on the street.
This is a serious problem for me because my own experience and the educational literature indicate that the recall or recognition of students is a vital element in the student-teacher learning relationship. This year I have experimented with an introduction exercise to help break the ice with my students and give me some background to add to the faces.
In the first lesson with a class, I explain my problem and why I am concerned about it. I then put up on the projector screen details about myself which I do not mind the students knowing: my name, educational qualifications, previous employment, courses I have taught; I also provide details about my family, hobbies, interests, and background.
I talk for a few minutes about why I support Geelong (an Australian Rules football team which is a perennial runner-up); how a non-animal-loving person ends up with a family that has a goat, two dogs, a Shetland pony, a horse, a cat, two fish, two rabbits, and a guinea pig; and my love for the music of Dylan, Springsteen, and the blues.
I then hand out sheets that ask each student to fill in his or her name, background, education, interests (hobbies, activities, etc.), skills (army training, drummer, languages, sports, graphic design, etc.), computer skills, and the three most important things they want from the course (apart from a good grade).
I ask the students to put down only the details that they care to share or do not mind people knowing.
After the lesson I spend several hours reading the sheets. I feel much closer to my students even without being able to link the names to faces. I learn, for example, about students who have never traveled outside Hobart (a town of 140,000 people) in their short lives, or about a young person who has spent 12 months working in a bakery in Japan. I discover a successful businessman returning to study whose wife is dying of cancer, and a young woman who has just failed to crack the international tennis circuit. In one course I learn about a military intelligence specialist with ten years of tank experience, a SAS-trained solider from the United Kingdom, and three officers in the army reserve (all the ingredients for a coup once our banana republic status is confirmed). Before this exercise they were just "students" in one of my classes.
I use the students' information sheets to refresh my memory throughout the semester. Before lectures I might look at a couple of the sheets and try to match a face to the background during the lecture. I also suggest that students reintroduce themselves each time they approach me until I tell them to stop.
About four weeks into the course I can do my "performance." I pick out a row in the middle of the lecture hall seating 150 students and I start to ask a series of questions, addressing each of the students by name. As I go along the row, the students recall my problem and know that I have been making an effort. Eventually my performance comes unstuck ("Excuse me, professor, I'm Trang, not Bev."). But the class and I know that at least I am trying to think of them as individuals.
These are simple techniques but they have helped me a great deal. Often it is the basics that will take us a long way in our journey as teachers; remembering students as individuals, keeping up our love for a subject, taking time to have fun. As I was writing this I received a Christmas card from one of my students; she wrote, "You've reached out to students in a way no other lecturer has (i.e., you remember not only the names, the country of origin, the day-to-day trials and tribulations . . . you also remember what it's like to be a student)."
