I am good at remembering names. I have terrible trouble with phone numbers, but that's a no-brainer: I'm an English prof, and I jsut don't math (I do turn "math" into a verb whenever possible, though).

I like to do this little game when on te first day of class in a class small enough--usually a composition class, where I can manage it while they students are writing a diagnostic. As they are writing, I am silently going over their names, backwards and forwards, so on the last minute of class, I, "just to see if I can do it," recite their names back to them, and individually welcome them to the class.

So ok, it's a gimmick. But we've got a minor retention problem here at WVU (we can keep 'em until their sophomores, but graduating them is tougher), and I really believe that taking time to learn my students' names (sometimes very quickly) means they are that much more likely to stick around. They believe, rightly, I hope, that I respect them enough to actually learn their names.

However, I do have this class of 40, and THAT, my friends, is a harder prospect. I'm going to try to have half of them down by the end of tomorrow's class. We'll see.