When I meet someone, and especially when I meet several people at a time, I often have trouble remembering names. Faces usually fix themselves easily in my brain, but names slide around, disappear. It's sad, but true.
Consequently, learning several classes worth of new student names each semester is a challenge.
Over the years, I have learned how to make the process easier, but it is always a struggle. Picture rosters have helped a great deal.
This semester the task has been particularly difficult as the students in my classes are all Korean and the roster is printed in hangul. No pictures. It's not that Korean names are especially difficult in and of themselves; it's that there are so many names that sound similar to dull American ears.
Those dull ears would be mine.
Still, over the weeks I learned to attach the correct name to a student most of the time. As always happens, one or two student names remain elusive.
Now the semester is over, and I have turned in grades. I tried hard to be sure that each name received the grade it was supposed to receive.
I have realized in the two weeks since our last classes that I really need to get better, not so much at learning names as at saying goodbye.
Odd as it may seem, when it comes to saying goodbye at the end of a semester, I find myself feeling awkward and shy, as I often felt growing up. It is always that way for me.
It is a most unfortunate character trait, particularly regrettable in this present instance when my short tenure combined with our mutual struggles to get to know each other make the goodbye a significant moment. Things worked out well for my graduate class because my students took us to lunch after the final session, as is the tradition here at PNU.
There is no such tradition for the undergraduate classes. Consequently, in my usual way, I let the moment slip by without the attention it deserved. We had spent the last class in a review session for the final, and as different groups of students finished at different times, I dismissed them by groups.
At the end, a small group remained, eager to chat. I dug out my camera and took their picture. I had actually intended to take a picture of the entire class, but that intention had been forgotten somehow as I visited study groups.
Thank you to these five for making our "goodbye" significant. To the other two-thirds of the undergraduate (Immigrant Literature) class, my apologies. It was a great experience. I had fun and I learned a lot. I will miss you all.
And some day soon, because of my experience with you, I would like to return and teach more classes at PNU.
For now, however, I have packing to do and more posts to write about Busan, so I will just leave you with a heartfelt kamsamnida!
Later, dudes!
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