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Our university takes student pictures for their library cards, and then
makes
all the names and pictures available by course and recitation section to
instructors. This was always VERY helpful even though a few students
would have
changed their appearance for some reason or other (I remember trying to
figure
out which student was the female with the shaved head, and discovered it
was my
dentist's daughter).
Something else I did was ask students (on the syllabus, and also on the
course
web site) to send me an email telling me about themselves: where they grew
up,
what they were majoring in, interesting places they'd traveled to, jobs,
hobbies, career plans, etc. Not everyone responded, but some wrote
mini-autobiographies with lots of unexpected details, especially some
memorable
female students. I would respond to these, making connections with my own
life
when possible (as when someone reported having spent a summer in France
near
where my mother grew up, or when a student expressed an interest in
forensic
science and I put her in touch with one, who was the wife of a colleague).
Many
students told me they'd never had a professor who showed much personal
interest
in them, and I heard some troubling stories about how some female students
had
been treated by their professors.