As well as teaching English, I work in my campus writing center, and while discussing students' papers and assignments, I often ask them the name of their instructor so I can get a handle on their assignment and its requirements.
Sometimes, they don't know their instructor's name.
And this is often WEEKS into the semester.
I then commonly probe them (in a non-sexual way, of course) for clues: Is your teacher a boy or a girl? Long hair? Short hair? Young or old? Tall or short? Glasses? Beard? Does his/her last name start with a 'D' or an 'L'?"
The student often either fumbles for their syllabus in embarrassment, looking for the name, or they offer up a guess, usually totally mispronounced.
My question to you is this: Does it even matter that students know our names? Is it a matter of students showing us respect, just a matter of common courtesy, a practical piece of useful information, or a matter of our ego demanding recognition?
I can guaran-fucking-tee you that I knew ALL of my teachers' names from preschool through grad school, and I didn't have to hurriedly search for the name when asked for it, and I'd guess that all of you were similar to me in this regard.
This "Teacher with No Name" phenomenon seems to be just another symptom of our demolished educational system, where the student is deemed so "important" that the teacher becomes a faceless nonentity, merely present to "facilitate" learning and hand out COOKIES like rewards for using the training potty.
And here's a side question for you: Do you let your students call you by your first name? If so, doesn't that make you feel a bit barfy? When my students insist on calling me by my first name, it turns my stomach.
If I had my way, students who don't know their instructors names would be in a Siberian logging camp.
ReplyDeleteI work in a 'first names are friendlier' kind of department. I am actually pretty OK with it, especially since my hair started to grey... but I am also very strict about ensuring that they BEHAVE towards me in a way that acknowledges my status as Dr Grumpy, so I have stock emails to send out about informal forms of address etc.
ReplyDeleteActually, in this situation, if a student 'belongs' to this department, it's more than a couple of weeks since the start of term, and they start an email/conversation with "Dr Grumpy", that's a strong signal that I am about to be lied to. The evidence is limited, but so far 100% of occasions when the above concatenation of events has been in place, I have either been able to demonstrate the lie or the excuse has been so spectacularly far-fetched I've been pretty confident it wasn't true (very awful, far-fetched things happen to students. However, when they DO happen, the afflicated student tends to report real events to all their professors, and bring in supporting evidence and apply formally for special consideration [i.e. not just tell me on one occasion and then have it 'vanish']. Typically the effects of the event also last longer than one deadline...)
Great question. I love when they come to me in the help center and say they have So-and-so and it turns out A) So-and-so is the wrong sex or B) So-and-so teaches in another department.
ReplyDeleteMain question: Yes, this has become more common.
ReplyDeleteStudent: I'm looking for my professor.
EnglishDoc: What's your professor's name?
Student: I dunno. Some guy with an accent/some old lady/a tall guy.
Then we're off to races with a game of 20 Questions. About how old? Hair or no hair? If hair, what color is it? White, black, or Hispanic? Which class at what time?
Side question: I don't care if they use my first name or my last as long as it's prefaced with Professor or Doctor and they pronounce/spell everything correctly.
The only thing that bugs me about students not knowing my name (ok, the thing that bugs me *most*) is that, given the 100-500 students I deal with each term, I'm strongly encouraged to put in effort to know THEIR names. I'm supposed to be able to say "Hi, Ashley/Brandon" to any one of them I run into outside of class or else I'm not "accessible" and I "don't care about my students." [they're currently almost ALL Ashley or Brandon which simplifies things a little] But, yeah, I fret about learning those 100 names while many of them can't be arsed to learn 5 names each term.
ReplyDeleteAnd while on the first day I have a slide up with my whole title and name, when pressed with the keener/officious students' "What Should We Call You?" (as if) I tell them to call me by my first name, because otherwise I'm Doctor Three-Syllables-with-a-hyphen which makes their heads asplode. The other two PhDs in my mostly-MFA department, though, insist on Dr. Three-Syllables themselves so I suspect I will get some flak someday about it from them.
Knowing one's teachers'/professors' names is evidence of engagement. USING the accurate name when in a proffie's presence is evidence of further engagement. Using such names--regardless of context--away from the presence of said authorities may be evidence of DEEP engagement.
ReplyDeleteUsing the correct name, whether it's Dr. LastName or Just Firstname, is a sign of respect. My department is also "first names only" which is fine with me, but it rankles me when students spell my name wrong on their cover page or in email.
ReplyDeleteMy name is all over the place in our classroom, so there's really no excuse.
Misspelling my last name makes some sense, since they generally only use my first name, but I had one who continually misspelled my first name. When I brought it up, the student said, "Oh, well, I don't really pay attention to names." Uh huh.
It is bizarre that they don't know our names. In my case, they probably have no idea what a Rolodex is. The first issue (they don't know our names) makes the second issue (first name?) moot.
ReplyDeleteWe have a nice portal on our campus website that allows authorized people to pull up student profiles, including their current (and past ) records. In terms of cetain student transactions, it is essential to be able to look up some of this stuff.
ReplyDeleteAnd in terms of sad, informatically-related 'flakiness, the students themselves can look this stuff up.
I don't really care if the don't know my name in general, but to write me they usually have to insert an address, and "Professor Idano" won't do.
ReplyDeleteI end up not knowing most of their names so I don't care if they don't know mine. I'm trying to remember the names of my professors from my first four years of college. I can't remember most of them. I can see their faces and remember their lectures, or that history prof that used to eat an entire apple while he taught, core and all. But names?
Er...
As for first names I don't tell them mine, so to use it they'd have to look it up. If they did, I'd ignore them until they stopped doing it.
This has come up elsewhere, but I don't get the "last name only" option that seems to be exercised so often now.
ReplyDeleteHow many emails do I get with JUST my last name as a greeting. Not even a fucking hello?!?
I'm with Mrs. C. It's not intelligence or flakiness. It's interest or engagement, even at a casual level. Just like with music. If somebody can't identify the Beatles from the Rolling Stones, then they can't be considered to be interested in 1960's rock and roll.
ReplyDeleteI know all the names of all my students. Most of them seem to know mine. I, too, think that it is a sign that we are both engaged in the classroom expereince. In the classes that meet less frequently I always feel a little unplugged from my students since it feels like it takes a lot longer to get to know each other.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was an adjunct pre-Ph.D. I taught mostly non-traditional students (read: I was the youngest, most inexperienced person in the room). It didn't seem right to go by Prof Professor since they were as much a teacher as I was. So I encouraged them the call my Craz (since Crazy sounds too formal).
Now I prefer Dr. Professor or Prof Professor since my newly minted college students have some trouble with boundaries. Not all of them have this issue just some. I think that by addressing their profs as Prof or Dr will discourage them from friending me on say Facebook or asking me out to bar after class.
So addressing each other by using names creates better engagement but being too personal creates problems.
I think there is another aspect to this than mere disrespect: there is also the average student's desperate desire for invisibility. They don't want to be seen. If they skulk in the back, if they never make eye contact, if they pretend not to know us and never learn our names so that they can pretend they're looking at a TV and not a person, it's easier to feel as thought they are invisible to us.
ReplyDeleteTheir deep desire for invisibility is a sadder and more complicated thing than their outward disengagement. It's not just laziness; it's also often a sense of being lost and not understanding that the need to find a way for themselves, or of being total collegiate imposters, or both. And the worst thing is that it's all a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more they skulk and hide the less they learn and the more they do not belong in a university setting.
I think an awful lot of them need two years of working at low-wage jobs, to get them ready, maturity-wise, and to light that fire under their butts.
Just please spell it right. There are five letters in my first name, and five in my last name. Please don't put extra letters IN because that "doesn't look right." It's even PHONETIC for chrissakes.
ReplyDeletePure disengagement. How many times do I have to repeat things? It's because their brains aren't turned on EVAH when they are with us. They're tuned into another frequency, perhaps, but they (most of my worst students, I mean) as if they are so totally stoned.
ReplyDeleteI'd like say, "Listen, stoned is more fun." Wake up!
I like the boundary of Prof. Last Name, perhaps because as a young woman I detested being called "Honey" or "Sweetie" by people (men) I barely knew. I longed for the day I could say, "That's DOCTOR Sweetie to you, Buster!"
ReplyDeleteNow it's amusing to see "Professor" stick in the craw of some students, mainly men, often retired men coming back to satisfy their interest in Basketweaving. They just can't get that honorific out towards this woman. So they don't call me anything. I get a lot of "Um, , , , " from them. I don't volunteer anything to make it any easier for them.
For my younger students, both men and women, I think it's good for them to address a woman using a name associated with authority. And maybe because we have small classes, they generally know our names here.
And I notice that recent veterans have no problem with women in authority! They also are most likely to actually use my name, do their homework, be on time, and approach me with questions about content. Is it engagement or the habit of discipline?
I question our current wars, but boy is military service good for these kids -- if they don't get a traumatic brain injury or other form of maiming.
I usually like them to call me Ms. CommProf or Professor CommProf. But as a student I had trouble feeling comfortable calling my profs by their first name because I felt like it wasn't as respectful as calling them by their titles and last names. It's a respect thing, I guess.
ReplyDeleteI also have to agree with Eskarina. At my school, we have A LOT of active duty, ROTC or veterans. Overall, they are the most respectful students I have. They always call me Prof CommProf and usually throw in a "Ma'am" when addressing me as well (how wonderful it is to hear "Thank you, ma'am" after answering a question or handing something back!) I would take a class full of soon to be, current or former military students any day over traditional students, and just slightly over a class full of other non-trads. It might be influenced by the fact that my husband was in the military (something I share with most of my classes in the first-day-of-class introductions) but my military students always treat me more respectfully than most of my other students (there are some traditional and nontrads that are wonderful too of course, but on average the military ones are better).
I don't care if they call me by my first name. They usually jack up my last name, even though it's only 5 letters long, but is another ethnicity, so can be tricky to pronounce. I had a student call me "honey" today (no lie...). The whole room about had a heart attack and then he made it worse by saying he calls all females that. I thought the female population in the room was going to lynch him and his "brothers" were just cringing and did NOT have his back on that one.
ReplyDeleteI try to learn all the names of my students and I always address them with respect. I reinforce this especially with emails. I require them to have a salutation, be nice/respectful, and have a closing (as well as sign the thing).
I don't have a problem with them calling me by my first name.
Eskarina -- love your handle! I've been vegging with discworld audiobooks as I wind down at the end of the day lately.
ReplyDeleteMy students are too scared of me to call me by my first name, and that's exactly how I like it. ;-)
ReplyDeleteIt also helps that I never tell my students my first name, anyway. In everything they see, I am "F. Frankenstien."
P.S. Most of the students in my big, general-ed astronomy class know my last name, because we have weekly labs. On these labs is a blank to fill in one's instructor's name, because with over 200 students in 8 lab sections and two lecture sections, it's easy to get them mixed up, particularly if they hand them in to the wrong instructor.
ReplyDeleteThis semester I am teaching two sections of these labs: the other six sections are taught by two grad students, one of whom has a beard, another who doesn't, so it's easy to tell us apart during labs when all sections meet together to observe the sky, even in the dark. Because of this situation, therefore, whenever a student still doesn't know my name more than a few weeks into the semester, this is invariably a little red flag.
I can barely manage to learn the names of all the students in a class of 15 in a term, much less 100!
ReplyDeleteI taught for a few years before I finished my PhD, but a lot of my students were non traditional and called me Dr. Lastname anyway. Correcting them didn't help at all. They would say, "well, in my day we always called our professors Dr. Lastname."
@Nadine: Hey, if they're conferring honorary degrees, it's ungracious of you not to accept! ;-)
ReplyDeleteThat's terrible. As Dr. What's-his-name put it last semester, not knowing your professor's name is a sign of deep disrespect. And I agree.
ReplyDelete