We’re a week into school and once again, somehow, I know almost every child’s name. If you teach in a self-contained classroom, that’s relatively easy. You see the same group of students all day. They get burned into your mind easily enough. But if, like me, you have multiple classes and almost 80 overall students, it gets a bit trickier at the start of the year to track who is who and who they are. That’s a lot of faces to quickly implant on your memory banks, which (if you are like me) are getting older and rustier, and have been lulled into relative inactivity by the end of the summer.

And each first day of school as I stare out into four classrooms of kids, I think: I am never going to remember all of these names.

But I do. And I try to do it as quickly as possible so that they feel like true members of the classroom, as part of the community. Names have power to them, and there is power in recognizing someone for who they are, too. I want them to connect with them early on, so that later on, any rough spots become smoother by our early connections. So, when they are writing in class these days, I am staring at their faces, mumbling their names, thinking of siblings I had, and coming up with memory tricks, if needed. (I have warned them that if I am saying their names while looking at them, don’t worry. I am not going to crazy.)

The first step to getting know and understand my new students as people is to get to know them by their names.

Peace (in the memory cells),
Kevin