Every year, I tell my students that it will take a while for me to learn their names. I have to make room in my brain to put their faces and the names that go with them. First I have to forget all of my students from the previous year. Knowing their names isn't useful, anymore, and I need to clear out that clutter. There's a lot that goes with each student, his or her face and his or her name. There are the strengths I can call on and the weaknesses I have to battle, the sound of each voice when I hear it from across the room or from behind me, the personalities that need something from me besides lessons in math. When I'm at the top of my game, I look through my roll sheets and ask myself, "Which of these kids needs my time (because they haven't received their fair amount)?" All of that goes into my memory and all of it needs to be purged to make room for a new year's mass of students. I need to make them individuals.
The diary portion continues after two paragraphs.
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Anyway, at the beginning of the year, I tell my students that I have to get rid of all my memories of last year's students. I tell my students that I do this every year. It's not that I don't have enough memory in the old hard drive; I have an information retrieval problem and it can't be solved except by a memory dump. Trust me, I have a new file open and you are all being loaded even as I speak (inevitably, I say the last four words of that as I approach a student who has begun to whisper to someone else- whoever it is gets all flustered and every other student goes on alert; I say it with a smile and I walk by- I can hear a room full of bodies swivel in their seats as the eyes follow me).
And I tell students that I will forget them. When the year is over and a new one begins, they will be pushed out. If they should happen to come back to the school and visit, I will have a hard time remembering them. It won't be because I'm getting old; it will be because they are getting older and will change. When they go to the high schools, they will change. The way they dress, the way they talk, the number of piercings and tattoos and the colors of their hair will all change. They will walk into my room differently. If I can remember them at all, it will be as a thirteen- and fourteen-year-old. I ask them to forgive me way ahead of time. I will do everything I can to know you right now but when you are done with me, when you leave this school and go on to high school, I want you to forget me. Learn from me now and move on. Learning means changing and every one of you has to change. You can't stay the way you are, no one wants you to stay the way you are and I'm sure you don't want to stay the way you are. By the way, if you're going to get a tattoo, try it with a henna one first. Wear it around for a while before you decide to have it for the rest of your life.
Each year, somewhere between five and ten students from previous years come into my room to visit. I can barely remember them and, to a student, they all remember that I told them that I wouldn't. A nineteen-year-old Marine Corporal remembered that I told him about change and that I wouldn't remember him; I hadn't seen him in five years but he came to see me before shipping out to Iraq. Last year, there was the high school Sophomore who came to see me and remembered that I wouldn't remember her. But she came to see me because she wanted my advice about whether to take the "Math Methods" class during her Junior year. "Math Methods" is a pre-Calculus class; what she really wanted to know was whether she should push herself into the higher math classes. I asked her how she felt about math because if she liked it, she should keep doing it but if it's just work, she should stop. She told me she liked it; she said she liked going home and doing math problems because it helped her clear her head and get ready to focus on her other homework. She said she learned that from me. I laughed and said, "I don't think I teach that." She said maybe not, but I did say she needed to change and math is a way for her to change every day.
The only people who should become teachers are those who can carry that kind of burden. You can never really know what you're changing.