On having pictures of students

A sheet of photographs lands in my office mailbox early each term that I'm teaching an undergraduate course -- black and white, postage-stamp-sized, in neat rows with names beneath each one, arranged in alphabetical order. It is a set of pictures of the students in my class. Or more accurately: it is a set of pictures of the people who were registered in that class at some recent point in time. It is all I have to keep students in my class from being completely anonymous to me, and it is not quite enough.

Not that I'm complaining; it's more than I used to get. For years I could, on special request to the Registrar's office, get a printout on green striped paper, done by a dot-matrix printer, with one line of basic information (name, rank, serial number) for each student. That was good only for recording marks. In the first class I taught at UW, I asked the students for photos and brief biographical information ("one interesting fact about you that will make you stand out in my mind"). Compliance went down over the years, until finally I got three in total from a huge first-year class, and I stopped asking.

The pictures are the same ones on students' Watcards. (You don't like your Watcard photo? Get me another.) These are the initiative of one faculty member in our department (pardon, School) who took the initiative to link up the classlist information that MFCF gets from IST who gets it from the Registrar's office, and the Watcard photo database from who knows where. I don't know if any other department does this. When it first started, most of the pictures were blurred and pixillated, featuring students in their first week at UW, before they shaved their heads, put all that metal in their face, and started wearing Kill Your TV T-shirts.

If I had a student stand right in front of me, and I stared at this sheet for a few minutes, there is a slight chance that I'll recognize them. In class, it's just about impossible. So I'll learn the obvious suspects -- the ones who ask the questions in class, the ones who frequent office hours. That probably only increases the gulf between me and the rest. Someone raises their hand, I say, "Jane? You have a question?" and the dudes in the back think, "The browner's on a first-name basis with the prof!".

Actually, I don't know what they think. Probably they won't notice that I'm using the name. But Jane will, and that will make a bit of difference. So I don't mean to sound ungrateful for that sheet of pictures. Courses are enough of a cynical bargain that we need to be thankful for what crumbs of humanity we get.

(Adapted from a blog posting made September 17, 2003.)