Deletions

My handphone remains happily primitive, but it does have a contact list and I've now developed the custom of annually reviewing the names therein and deleting those no longer applicable. No, I'm not eliminating enemies. It's just that every year I find myself adding the contacts of any of my students in that year who send text messages so that I, or rather my phone, will 'remember' who they are. This turns out to be a lot of names, and once they've graduated it's not terribly likely the majority will need to get in touch again. However, I do leave them in for a year, just in case they contact me with regard to references and the like. So the deleting exercise means getting rid of those names for whom there's been no sign of contact for a whole year, and no likelihood of such in future.

Now here's the odd thing. Each time I remove a name I find myself remembering vividly the person involved. This doesn't always mean I knew them terribly well, but almost all I did know will come flooding back. Occasionally this needs to be prompted by a quick glance at an old class list when I'm dealing with a fairly common name and I'm a bit confused as to which particular Esmeralda it is. (That's a joke example, by the way.) But generally remembrance is easy in that moment - though I may not have thought in any distinct way of the person for quite a while. However, once they're gone, they're very, very gone, usually. My memory seems to function that way, as if it closes down on the information completely.

I know this sounds awful in some ways, as if I just don't care about the person whom I'm forgetting, but it's really not like that. I suspect it's a pragmatic way of dealing with memory overload. And there's a curiously positive side to all this. When the name is deleted I remind myself that the person involved just isn't the same anymore as my mental image of them. They've grown, matured, become richer individuals. I really don't know them now in that positive sense, and that's a happy thought: they've escaped my narrow understanding of them.

I don't know about other teachers but somehow, for me, students I've taught remain exactly as they were when I knew them, in a kind of frozen memory (when I do remember them.) Suddenly, yesterday, I thought of two girls I taught very briefly on a teaching practice a long, long time ago. Their good humour and amused toleration of my shortcomings as a not very capable student-teacher came vividly to mind and I recalled exactly what each looked like, though I don't think I gave them a second thought after the teaching practice ending. In my mind they remain an eternal fourteen years of age. In reality, assuming they've lived and nothing awful has happened to them, they'll now be around fifty-one. Gosh! Strange.