Hello my name is...

I often dread the first day of any class for one reason, and one reason only: getting to know you activities. You know the ones where the course instructor says something along the lines of, "Ok, to start off today's class, we are going to go around the room and share our names, major, where we are from and one interesting fact about ourselves!" and then there is a collective sigh, or eye roll, or groan from the class. I genuinely dislike giving interesting(?) facts about myself because there is only so many times you can tell people, "I have found over 200 four leaf clovers" or "I have a twin brother, no we are not identical, but yes we do get asked that all the time" before they get bored or stop listening entirely (if they were even listening in the first place, that is). And even though I am sure that my classmates all have very fascinating lives, and that the facts they give about themselves are all very interesting, I can't help but feel that these activities do not help anyone learn the names of the people sitting around them. I am not going to remember someone's name based off of their favorite animal or other favorite thing. That being said, I really liked the activity we did in class where we had to introduce someone else to the class. It took the pressure off of us to figure out a new fact about ourselves, and allowed us to get to know at least one person in the class on a deeper level than, "This is so-and-so, they are from Florida, and their favorite color is teal." Furthermore, the activity allowed all of us to see how other people would describe us and it allowed us to see our classmates' writing styles as we read the paragraphs we'd written out loud. Overall, I am really glad that we had to do this activity because it made remember the names of everyone in the class, which is nothing short of a miracle because I am terrible with names.