I’ve always worked hard to be able to get to know my students’ names relatively quickly during the semester. I think I may have finally hit upon a successful way of doing this within the first two weeks (short of taking postage-sized sticky photos of each student and practicing at home).

On the first day of class, I have students get into groups of four or five, pick a spokesperson, and introduce themselves to each other. They have to tell each other their names, their major, and one thing that they think is interesting about themselves or otherwise important for the class to know. Then it is the spokesperson’s job to introduce the members of the group to the whole class. This way, shy students aren’t forced to talk when they don’t feel comfortable doing so.

I’ve also been taking roll by having students sign in on a sheet I pass around each day. I finally realized they should write their interesting/important thing next to their names. For whatever reason, the combination of three items (face, name, thing) allows me to remember them more quickly than the combination of only two items (face, name). So as I sit here, for example, I can picture the student who is going to the Renaissance Fair in costume, but I can’t remember her name. A quick check of the latest sign-up sheet, however, fills me in.

Remarkably few of the students remember each other’s names or interesting details, however. I’m going to keep calling them on that, I think.

I wrote an early post in the life of this blog about trying to come to terms with my blogging identity (and my newly acquired professorial identity), still feeling the twinges of the transition from graduate student to professor. Things feel more settled now, but I’m still thinking. Today’s entry by Elouise on “virtual fraternization” prompts me to wonder if any students of mine (ir)regularly read my blog. Conversely, do any of them keep blogs that I don’t know about? If you’re out there, speak up. That’s what the comments are for. A student from last semester mentioned in an email that he’d read my blog, but he hasn’t commented. A couple of colleagues have mentioned coming across it, but no comments.

Well, Heidi has a blog, and she’s a student at UMKC, where I teach. We read each other’s blog, but we’ve never met. Jenny took my “Introduction to Humanities Computing” course at the University of Maryland (I wrote about it when I found her blog, and she commented on the entry). And Eric took my “Print, Literature, and Social Transformations in Eighteenth-Century England,” also at UMD. I was a grad student when I taught both classes, however, so is it more accurate to describe them as former students or as fellow students? Or both? Eric and I were also coworkers at MITH. The boundaries are not so clear, and they never have been.

A famous cartoon says that, online, nobody knows you’re a dog. But you and I both know that sooner or later you’re gonna start woofing and give yourself away.

Flying back from New York at Christmas, sitting in the airport bar, I see a UMKC student, one I don’t yet know too well, though she later takes my spring graduate seminar. What are the odds? I don’t go up and talk to her because … well, I don’t know. I feel like a dork; she’s got tattoos and sits with hip-looking friends. I’m also sort of hungover and not feeling my best.

In April, I blog about my intent to investigate the Buddhist temple in my neighborhood. Well, mid-summer I do, and who do I run into there but one of my students from spring semester, both of us now sitting in on a class on Buddhism. From professor-student to student-student again.

I discover that a student from my Milton class works at a local video store. I peruse his picks in the “staff recommendation” section. We talk over the counter about an exhibit at a local museum.

I attend the UMKC spring graduation ceremony, sitting with grad students because I’ve been asked to lead them where they’re supposed to go (as if I know). When the speaker asks the faculty to stand up, I look around blankly until one of the students nudges me and says, “That’s you.” Oh. Right. Two weeks later, or so, I attend the UMD graduation ceremony where my dissertation advisor has generous things to say about my work as his student. I seem to be a character in a novel that’s doing confusing things with time. Student? Professor?

But I don’t know if anyone here keeps their own blog. And people are often more candid in their blog than they are online. And people often don’t know their readers through venues other than their blog. And as CNWB acknowledges, many of us write blogs as an outlet to say things we otherwise feel we can’t say, even to our friends: “I wouldn’t want to subject them to my uninhibited ramblings, just as I wouldn’t bail them up in real life and crap on about the things I discuss here. The greatness of blogging is that if people want to listen to me, they’ll come, and I don’t have to worry about boring anyone.”

I haven’t explicitly promoted my blog to my non-blogging acquaintances. It came up at a party, and since then, some of them have found it, most haven’t looked (or if they have, they didn’t mention it). But if you google “george h williams”, guess what the number one hit is? Sooner or later, people are gonna notice, right? And some (many?) of those people are gonna be students. What then? I’m not too worried, frankly, but maybe I should be … ?