Strategies for teaching with facial aphasia (inability to recognize faces aka prosopagnosia, face-blindness) I'm a math grad student in my first year, which means that I have not yet taught a class (in my program first years grade or provide one-on-one tutoring for students who struggle in calculus). I have facial aphasia, which means that I am completely unable to recognize people's faces. After a while (upwards a year) I can reliably recognize someone based on how they move, dress, wear their hair and so on. Before that I will just have a vague feeling that I recognize someone, but I can't put a name to them . It happens that I can't recognize people I've lived with for several years, or, on a few memorable occasions, my own family members. This causes some problems on occasion, but nothing I haven't been able to work out. However, up until now the people I've been expected to learn to recognize have been friends, or coworkers I see every day that I can explain my problem with faces to. My question is:

How do I handle teaching when I can't recognize my students and it would take me a year minimum to learn their faces? I know from my own experience that good instructors / TAs learn their students' names and faces and this helps motivate the students to learn, because they notice that their teacher cares about them. How can I compensate for my facial aphasia?

EDIT: Thank you for all the great responses! I feel a lot more confident that I can do well as a TA with all these ideas to work with :)
Unless it is too embarrassing to you, you might actually consider simply telling your students about your facial aphasia at the beginning of the semester.  You can explain that even though you care about them and know who they are as people and students, you won't be able to recognize them by appearance.  A more familiar condition you might make an analogy to is color-blindness.

You might then ask them to identify themselves by something that you will be able to recognize them by.  For example:


If it's a small class, you might make name tags to sit on students' desks in front of them during class.
In a large class, you might ask students to say their name when they ask a question.


You know your condition best, of course, and what things will work well for you.  You are, of course, admitting a weakness and some of the nastier undergraduates might attempt to use it to play pranks on you or to cheat in some way.  I suspect, though, that at that age in most cases it may be better to play it straight and people will respect you more for doing that than for attempting to hide it.