My I Am Not a Number: Remembering You Matter
You’re not your behaviour. You’re not your thoughts. You’re not a number
“You know I can’t give you your results,” I told the voice at the other end of the line.
“But I’m smiling.”
Students often called me, as the programme administrator, to get a sneaky heads up, and whilst I couldn’t give them their results until the official publication date, I did my best to put their minds at rest.
Generally, the students who failed rarely called me ahead of time.
Years ago, I loved working in the School of Architecture. I joined at the tail end of students being important rather than a statistic.
Although I hated meetings, when it was my turn to take minutes, I left it as long as possible to type them up, hoping the attendees had forgotten what they said as I could never read my writing.
I had a weird memory thing that I could remember students’ names and faces. Clearly, I couldn’t remember what was said in a meeting, but hey, ho.
Knowing their names meant I could say hello to Jack or Jill when I passed a student in a corridor. This freaked them out a little as they thought they’d done something wrong, but they soon got used to it and liked that they…
