Jan 19, 2017 3 min read

When teaching a university writing class, the number of names on the roster is important. First, there are the papers to grade; sometimes when I’m red-inking my way through a stack of not-so-great homework, I wish I were teaching third grade social studies or some other class that only grades multiple choice. Or gym.

And roster size is important for another reason: the names. Each semester brings a new roomful of students whose names I must learn. Most semesters I have six or seven students. This semester it’s twice that number, a challenge that has forced me to develop new face-identification/memory tools with which to keep them all straight.

It helps that college students tend to select a seat on the first day of class and remain in that seat the whole semester. This allows me to spread out a memory map of the classroom. Alex in the far back left-hand corner is Alaska. Both are A words, so that’s easy.

Kaylee in the back right-hand corner is Maine. People in Maine are healthy and eat lots of Kale. Weird, but it works. Michigan is Andy, who wore a stocking cap the first class. Andy-with-the-hat I told myself, committing it to memory.

The problem is in the vast Midwest of the room, where Zachary and Joseph and Aubrey and Brittany occupy the reference points of Kansas and those other square states. I thought about asking Aubrey to move to the Alabama seat, but that would have sounded nutty.

At least there are no duplicate names in this class. There have been semesters during which I’ve had to keep track of several Hayleys and Sarahs. My first semester teaching a college course, I taught a room full of Ashleys.

I read a story this week about some new theories on why people, mothers in particular, tend to mix up the names of their children. I do it all the time – calling my son by the dog’s name or my daughter by my son’s name. My own mom tended to call out the names of all three of us kids before finally landing on the one she meant.

Psychologists say this is because we all have brain “files” in which we hold the names of people in certain groups: all the kids in a kid file, dogs in the pet file, students in a school file and so on. When we are reaching for a name, our brain pulls out the whole file and things get jumbled. I’ve done this with our dogs for so long now that all three of them will respond to any old name.

And I’m not that great with names to begin with. I have an acquaintance named Kerry and for years I called her Lorrie and another named Sherry whom I think of as Jen. These are smart, kind women who have refrained from clobbering me. I don’t see them nearly enough, which is probably part of the problem.

We’re two weeks into the semester and I’m making progress with my students’ names. So long as they stay in their chosen seats, I should have this mastered in another week or two.

And please, Andy, always wear the hat.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.