Here's my entry for this week's Tachygraphy offering.

Sometimes I have a hard time keeping my students' names straight, if they're not sitting in their usual seats. One time our school took all the 9th graders to a production of Romeo and Juliet (it was pretty bad), and I had the worst time trying to take roll based on faces alone. I'd be calling someone's name, and the students would just look at me in disbelief -- this was many months into the year -- and wondered how I could not realize the girl was sitting right in front of me. It's because so many of them look the same! Oh, it's the one with the Amercrombie & Fitch shirt, okay. That clears it up.

This is not to say, of course, that their identies are identical; far from it. I can sometimes tell whose paper is whose based on the first sentence alone. But insofar as much of teenage life is based around looking similar, I have to beg forgiveness when I can't match faces with names.