3088. Teachers' Affection and Attention


 
Some days ago an adult student of mine, after a lesson, asked me how we teachers could remember and recall our students’ names, even at the beginning of the school year, which isn’t the case anyway. I told him it is an ability that in some sense we teachers have.
It is practice, the practice of remembering our students’ names, characteristics and traits, as many class-groups have passed through our hands throughout years. However also it is because of the affection we have to each of our students: you can recall the names of those people you value in some way or another.
As well I’ve noticed that memory, up to some extent, is like an elastic ability you can train. A teacher once told me that she could remember many target language words because she had expanded her memory because of many times trying to learn new words and terms. She had acquired kind of a photographic memory. And any teacher could acquire that kind of memory, if he or she practiced the process of learning new words, over and over again.
On top of that when I was a child I also admired that teachers’ ability of treating and addressing each student of theirs, with respect and by their names. / Photo from: www responsiveclassroom org

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