The Name of the Story is the Story of the Name

One of my biggest first-week-of-classes tasks is to memorize student names. I always commit to my students that I will have their names memorized by the second day of class, and that's not easy for me. It takes a lot of work, but I've got my little system down and it's pretty effective. This year I have more than twice as many students as I've had any semester in the past eight years, and it taxed my cognitive capacity, but as of today I have all of my students' names down. It feels like a major accomplishment.

The biggest help when I'm memorizing student names is for the student to look like their name. I was thinking about this as I flipped through my flashcards and felt brief flashes of appreciation for students who were courteous enough to just look like a Michaela or a Spencer or an Amanda. I'm not rigid about this, and in fact I'm pretty flexible with generic names. A Rachel, for instance, should have light brown hair and freckles and be kind of shortish, but if she's tall with curly blond hair, I can buy into that. I've known lots of Rachels who don't fit my concept image of Rachel and it's pretty easy to convince me that Rachel looks like a Rachel. But if Rachel does have light brown hair and freckles and is kind of shortish it just makes things so much easier.

However, if a student is named something non-generic, it can be harder to convince me that they can look much different than I expect. An Edith really ought to have shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair and brown eyes. A Wayne should be a little stocky but not fat and have thick dark hair and blue eyes. Edward needs to have close-cut brown hair and wear glasses. If Whitney is blonde, I will never remember her name when her flashcard comes up because Whitney's aren't supposed to be blonde.

I was actually really young the first time I remember noticing that I thought people should look like their names. I was riding the bus to school, so I had to be six years old because I only rode the bus to school when I was six. A girl got on the bus and I didn't know her, but I felt like her name needed to be Jackie. She had red hair in a braid and freckles and was tallish and skinny, and she was on crutches because of a sprained ankle, but the crutches were irrelevant to her Jackie-ness (although they didn't hurt her case). When another kid on the bus called her Jackie, I was kind of startled. I had been so very certain that her name had to be Jackie that I didn't think I should have been right.

The other name story I remember from this period of my life was that there was a boy named Michelle at my school. I was sure of this fact, and I thought nothing of it. I assumed that Michelle was a non-gender-specific name like, well, Jackie. Or Jamie or Jessie. Shortly thereafter I moved to California and in my new first grade class, or maybe it was a year or two later in second or third grade, we somehow got talking about names that could be either boy names or girl names, and I suggested Michelle.

"No," said the teacher (whichever teacher it was). "Michelle is just a girl's name." I think I defended myself, insisting that I had known a boy named Michelle, but no one believed me and I started to doubt myself. I also felt embarrassed because I wasn't usually wrong when I answered a question in class (more because I was shy enough to only speak up when I was sure I was right than that I was really always right). I realized that I had never actually met another Michelle who was a boy, and I wondered if maybe the Michelle I'd known had actually been a girl with boyishly short hair. When you're six you're allowed to make mistakes like that. So for years I've thought of this incident as a little-kid-confusing-genders-because-of-hair-length story. But now that I'm writing this, I want to side with my young self again. I'll bet I did know a boy named Michelle, except I'll bet it was actually Michel, and at six years old I didn't know about alternate spellings and names of non-English origin.

My elementary-school-age self feels validated now. And my college-professor-age self feels off-topic. And tired from a full week of teaching. I don't remember where I was going with this anymore, so I'd better end here. Anyone else have funny/interesting/relevant name stories?