Dear colleague,
I don't have the best memory in the world when it comes to the names of former students, and it really bothers me. I'll see a student I taught several years ago while doing some grocery shopping in our small town, and I'll recognize the face, remember the delight I took in teaching that student… but not their name.
“Hey, there… guy! How's it going?”
It's painful. I don't like not being able to recall the name of a person I believe is fearfully and wonderfully special.
But, it's also how the mind works. We remember what we think about (see Principle #4 in the Principles of Learning Course). This is why it's so important to teach our students to study via retrieval practice and get past the familiarity trap. I struggle with the names of those students I run into in the grocery store because every school year there are 100+ new students that I'm thinking about; it's a lot of cognitive work building mental models of 100+ human beings. The names vanish over time because my mind hasn't thought of those names in several years.
So even though it's painful to forget my former students' names over time, I accept it as part of my finitude. I can only think of so many things or people in a given day. In work like ours, there are a LOT of people to think about over the years. It's not a great feeling knowing the face but not the name of a former student, but it's just one of those limitations of the human mind that I've come to accept.
All that said, there are very important things that I think we teachers are prone to forgetting. I'm not talking about names here — I'm talking about purpose, about first principles, about the reasons that an education is good.
It's remembering these things that drives me to write and talk about teaching like I do. I've met enough 30+ year educators who sustain the fire to teach to recognize that one of their common traits is that they are exceptionally good at remembering the answers to a few basic questions:
- What's school for?
- What's my class/subject/discipline for?
- Why are these things good?
- What are the best means through which to help students grow in mastery of our subject?
The vaguer your answers to these questions, the worse off you'll tend to be. The less you think about and work out the implications of the answers to these questions, the harder time you'll tend to have.
That is a deep commonality amongst folks who build long and impactful careers.
Something to ponder today, colleague.
Thinking about these things right beside you,
DSJR
P.S. I can't imagine teaching without a solid grasp of how learning works. It's so important to me, in fact, that I created an in-depth course about it called Principles of Learning.
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