This semester I am teaching 20 hours of classes per week, with a total of about 180 students. That's more than usual for me recently. The past couple of years it's been closer to 130. If you don't count repeat students, I meet around 200 new students every semester. If I can remember a single name from a previous semester it is a minor miracle, but I can usually recognize former students when I see them on campus.
And of course every semester there are students who look kind of like students I have taught previously. There are only so many combinations of features possible, especially in a relatively homogeneous population like that of Korea. In a way, when you recognize someone it's because they present enough of the right pieces in the right places for your brain to to put the pieces together and make a picture that connects with your mental model of that person.
But this semester is hitting differently. I have a handful of students who look a lot like students I've taught before. Four weeks into the semester that feeling has shifted into something like, "Oh yeah, I've known this student for years!" when rationally I know that is absolutely false.
If I could remember the names of the previous students, I would ask, "Are you so-and-so's sibling? Or (gasp) child?" Except that asking "Do you have an older relative?" is kind of a weird question if you can't actually name the older relative, or even guess what year they might have studied with you.
I wondered if this was a recognized phenomenon, like déjà vu, so I tried asking ChatGPT. It's pretty good at figuring out what word you are looking for to match a complicated idea. In this case, it wrote:
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The short answer to the actual question is: there may be several named phenomena adjacent to what you're describing—déjà vu, déjà vécu, cryptomnesia, source-monitoring errors, and facial familiarity without identification—but I don't know of a specific named phenomenon meaning “people in a new generation start looking familiar because they resemble people from an earlier generation you've encountered professionally.”
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Fun stuff, right? But more rabbit hole than solution.
After some discussion with my low-budget, unreliable, artificial therapist, I came to the conclusion that my facial recognition database is full and I'm experiencing stack-overflow errors. (And people say that AI can't relate to us!) In other words, I have too many familiar face pieces stored in my head, and they are desperate to connect up to make a familiar face. I'm getting false recognition signals. Useless information.
Sometimes having too many pieces causes problems. But sometimes having excess pieces keeps the problem interesting.
You see, I've also noticed a similar phenomenon in the area of recognizing the personalities of my students: that there are really only a handful of student personality types. I think I recognize them all, usually within the first couple of weeks. I want to be good at teaching all of them, in any combination. When I get an odd combination of types, what you might consider a difficult class, I consider it a challenge. And I don't get bored with classes, because not only are they all slightly different in composition, they all have a variety of possible outcomes.
For me every class is like a puzzle, and I kind of like solving puzzles. Especially jigsaw puzzles. I have a stack in my office, and will set one up on my table if I really need to chill out. Every class is a different puzzle, every student is a piece, and the pieces fit together differently depending on how you finesse them. But unlike the facial recognition problem, recognizing these pieces works in my favor.
Some classes are easy puzzles. I have a few classes with students who took my class last semester (the veterans). They like my style, and they sought me out to experience it again. The veterans help the new students to figure out how things work, and those classes are up and running smoothly by the end of the 2nd week. That means that I can make them into some really interesting pictures: more focus on larger conversation strategies, and how to be an excellent conversation partner, rather than just competent at English conversation.
One class has no veterans, but a majority of students seem to like the idea of becoming better at English conversation, so they do what I ask them to do. They make mistakes in following my directions, but don't mind being corrected and learn from each other. They will make a lovely picture of confidence and curiosity.
I've also got a couple of low-level classes. Most of the students are "normal" for Korea: they've studied English, but haven't practiced speaking much, if at all. They're taking this class because it's a required course, but wouldn't be here if they could avoid it. They are at least somewhat interested in getting a good grade, so they do the minimum of what I ask them to do. They will make a pleasing landscape: they won't be able to go deep, but by the end of the semester many of them will be nice to talk to, and not scared of talking to someone in English.
The difficult classes are the real puzzles: these classes have a handful of "wing-nuts," as my friend Rick put it. Often--but not exclusively--sports majors, they are way more interested in entertaining each other than improving their communication. They can be friendly, especially if you meet them with some Korean, but they are easily overwhelmed and quickly resort to class clown mode or shutting down.
A common response to the wingnuts is to treat them with contempt, ignoring them while focusing on the students who are prepared to learn. I've done that, as well as trying to strongarm them into doing what I want.
But in the past few years I have found more satisfaction in convincing the wing-nuts to try, and celebrating their little victories. Everyone likes to be celebrated, whether they admit it or not. Some are like cats, tolerating it then lashing out when they realize that they have been fooled into camaraderie. But most of them see their own progress and are pleasantly surprised. And when I fail at my job (because it feels like failure when I don't convince the wing-nuts to join me), they just do as little as they can get away with. They pass or they fail, but they don't really learn much.
I know that I am not a failure in those situations. The two hours a week we share is not going to turn a student around if they don't want to be turned. Some of the wing-nuts have rusted in place. I don't have enough WD-40 for all of them. Archimedes said, "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." Sure. But what are you going to bring to the next class? Or the one after that? Or the fifth in a row?
It's rare for me to find a student that doesn't match a previous type. In my toolkit I now have drivers for most every kind of personality: the eager, high-achieving students, the wing-nuts, the apathetic phone-glued zombies (thankfully few), the kids that are surprised to find that they can learn to have English conversation and get better at it, the shy ones, the outgoing ones, and the rebels who don't seem to fit in with the rest of the class. They are all unique in their own way, and they all fit together into puzzles with varying levels of complexity and beauty.
When I do jigsaw puzzles I deliberate hide the box, so I have to find the picture as it emerges. An English class doesn't come with a box, but I get a similar enjoyment out of discovering the picture they form. Some classes are the Mona Lisa, some are Dogs Playing Poker, and some are just a heavy-handed crayon drawing of our house and a fire truck.
Even the house and fire truck get their day on the fridge.
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