How to Enjoy Face-to-Face Confrontations with Your Students on Your First Day of Class

When I was a college freshman, most of my courses met in large lecture halls. The professors stood in the front at their lecterns and droned, whined, and moaned as they read their notes to us. As students, we become dutiful stenographers, jotting down our interpretations of the professor’s intonations as if the printing press had never been invented. Every few weeks, we spewed back these notes to get our well-heard A’s, B’s, and C’s. Most professors didn’t know my name and my identity was more or less known to the graduate assistants who checked if I (or a reasonable substitute, such as Denzel Washington) was sitting in my chosen or assigned seat; usually Row E, Seat 11 (roughly, the mezzanine).

Well, prisoner E11 has grown up and now I’m a professor in a college that has very few lecture halls. Most of our sections have no more than 35 students and except for a few professorial fossils, like Dr. X (You know who you are; you old gasbag!), most of us have given up the old chalk-and-talk, dictate and regurgitate routine. We want to engage our students in dialogues other than our internal monologues and fantasies. We assume that our students can and should read and write outside of the classroom and the class session should be used for enhancement, clarification, and expansion of assignments. To do this, we need to get to know students as persons; each with their own faces and voices. Except for terrorists, anonymity doesn’t "make it" anymore.

I have more than 150 students per semester; how can I get to know them quickly? As I psychologist, I know that visual memory is far superior to lexical and auditory memory, so I use a very simple mixture of high and low-technology. In the very first meeting of my class, I have the students sign in by hand on a piece of notebook paper and I ask them to jot down their names and their majors. I call their names and I try to engage them in short conversations. I try to get a visual "fix" on their faces and names. This isn’t always that hard because we have a good deal of diversity and I usually can figure out that Jung Kim isn’t blond and Sven Jensen probably isn’t Latino. On the other hand, someone like Susan Goldberg, an attractive Asian kid, may keep me guessing. I know that like cocktail party introductions, these first acquaintances might not stick in my memory; but it’s a start.

For the final memory "glue", I take a high-technology path. In the last ten minutes of class, I take a digital camcorder and I walk down my classroom aisles and tape the students as I engage the in short conversations about what I remembered them talking about in class. It might be as simple as, "You’re Steve Smith. You’re a pre-law major; right?" This only takes about five minutes. Finally, I turn my camera off, go back to my office, and download the video into my computer. I study the clips over and over until I have the names etched into my noggin. If I see students on campus before our next class session, I try to greet them by name and then I review the video just before our next meeting. I can even burn the videos to disk for all posterity. You’d be surprised how well this tactic works in creating more effective and personally rewarding class atmospheres.