You might be teaching a gen-ed class if it’s November and it occurs to you that not all of your students know your name. (In fact, I discovered this when a student was reduced to describing me to A, whom he didn’t know was my wife. “He’s got no hair . . . he wears glasses, and a tie. He teaches Brit Lit.”)
*Sigh.*
One remedy: The Mountain Goats.
(Update: In-joke for local readers deleted out of deference to yesterday’s campus news.)
Dance | 18-Nov-07 at 9:21 am | Permalink
uh, I don’t know. I’ve seen this happen in non gen-ed courses–a 300/400 level course, among majors in the subject? Who were excited about the material?
jbj | 18-Nov-07 at 9:27 am | Permalink
Wow . . . that’s not pretty. It hadn’t even occurred to me to check the upper-division students. (Although, in that situation, fully 50% of the class has had a class with either me or my wife before, so at least *some* of them have the brand-identification down!)
Dance | 18-Nov-07 at 11:11 am | Permalink
I’m considering a theory about contextual knowledge? They don’t forget our names to our faces (I hope), it’s just that they think “actually-in-class” is the only necessary context to remember them. A very extreme version of the way we forget (many) student names a week after grades are turned in, and take longer to come up with them when we see them outside of class.
PS. I just read backwards for a *whole* bunch of posts.