Congratulations; you’ve motivated me to decide I’ll use some sort of SRS to remember the names of my students, the next time I have to TA a class (most likely in January).
I’ll find something to use one way or the other, but if you manage to provide a working alternative by that time, I promise to use it.
I used SRS to remember my student’s names. They thought I had superpowers.
(I didn’t have the TA facebook until after the first session, and so I introduced myself and shook the hand of every student, and then got the facebook and memorized the names with SRS before the second session. It might be similarly impressive to know their names before the first session without them telling you, but that runs the risk of seeming creepy.)
I always thought that memorizing faces and personal details would be a good use of SRS, but I never really had any opportunity where it was worthwhile. Glad to hear it works!
The July minicampers made an Anki deck for learning faces/names/bios before camp. We didn’t get quite enough time to train properly, but it was still a massive help compared to learning 30 names in real time.
The class I’m TAing has about 60 students in it; I see 40 or so regularly because one of the recitations is early in the morning and fewer people show up to it. Despite being rather lazy about reviewing, I can match around 90% of the photos to names, and make almost no mistakes going in the other direction (trying to imagine the photo given the name).
However, I think I only have around 50% success rate when faced with actual students. The photos I have are likely outdated (they’re the photos taken for university IDs freshman year, and I suspect most of my students aren’t freshmen) so that might be the problem. Another problem is that when learning the cards, I tend to remember facial expressions and incidental details like background color, even though I try not to; obviously this knowledge doesn’t help in actual interaction with the students.
(I used Anki instead of MemStash.co because I couldn’t get the latter to do what I wanted.)
Congratulations; you’ve motivated me to decide I’ll use some sort of SRS to remember the names of my students, the next time I have to TA a class (most likely in January).
I’ll find something to use one way or the other, but if you manage to provide a working alternative by that time, I promise to use it.
I used SRS to remember my student’s names. They thought I had superpowers.
(I didn’t have the TA facebook until after the first session, and so I introduced myself and shook the hand of every student, and then got the facebook and memorized the names with SRS before the second session. It might be similarly impressive to know their names before the first session without them telling you, but that runs the risk of seeming creepy.)
I always thought that memorizing faces and personal details would be a good use of SRS, but I never really had any opportunity where it was worthwhile. Glad to hear it works!
The July minicampers made an Anki deck for learning faces/names/bios before camp. We didn’t get quite enough time to train properly, but it was still a massive help compared to learning 30 names in real time.
How has it gone so far?
The class I’m TAing has about 60 students in it; I see 40 or so regularly because one of the recitations is early in the morning and fewer people show up to it. Despite being rather lazy about reviewing, I can match around 90% of the photos to names, and make almost no mistakes going in the other direction (trying to imagine the photo given the name).
However, I think I only have around 50% success rate when faced with actual students. The photos I have are likely outdated (they’re the photos taken for university IDs freshman year, and I suspect most of my students aren’t freshmen) so that might be the problem. Another problem is that when learning the cards, I tend to remember facial expressions and incidental details like background color, even though I try not to; obviously this knowledge doesn’t help in actual interaction with the students.
(I used Anki instead of MemStash.co because I couldn’t get the latter to do what I wanted.)