Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships, but frankly, I’d have been far more interested in devising a mathematically elegant mechanism to sink them. Preferably one involving leverage, poor decision-making, and a failure to understand proportional reasoning.

The other day I met someone called Helena, and I was immediately envious. Not of her, exactly, but of her name. I have spent most of my life as simply Helen. Helena can become Lena, Nell, Nellie, or any number of variations. Helen is just Helen. Australians are famous for shortening names, adding an “o” or an “ie” to almost anything, but there is not much you can do with Helen. It has always seemed a rather final sort of name.

That encounter got me thinking about names and why they matter.

As you may notice from the title of this blog, I’ve played around with names for years: hel’n’commentary, hel’n’damnation, and 2hel’n’bac. Names matter to me. They always have.

And that, naturally enough, led me to Shakespeare and:

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Shakespeare asked, “What’s in a name?” and answered that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. I’m not entirely convinced. Names carry history, personality, relationships, and expectations. They are often the first gift we receive and, in many ways, the last thing people remember about us.

Take Helen, for example.

The name is forever associated with Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships and sparked a war. A woman so beautiful that nations fought over her. Yet that image has never felt particularly relevant to me. I am far more interested in figuring out how to sink the ships than launch them.

In fact, every time I hear the story of Troy, I find myself wondering about entirely different things. Who was the idiot who let a giant wooden horse inside the city walls without checking what was in it? Come on, people, you’re at war. The enemy suddenly leaves you a massive wooden horse and sails away. Surely someone should have thought that through.

And then there is Helen herself. Did she actually want to be rescued? Did anybody ask her? The story assumes that because she belonged to Menelaus and Paris took her away, Menelaus had the right to reclaim her. But perhaps Helen was perfectly happy where she was. Perhaps there was a reason she left in the first place. History, mythology, and storytelling often tell us far more about what people expected women to do than what women themselves may have wanted.

Names come with stories attached to them, and sometimes those stories are difficult to wear.

Imagine being named Rainbow in the 1970s or 1980s and growing up to become a fifty-eight-year-old tax accountant or the CEO of a multinational corporation. Names carry images. They create assumptions. Some fit us comfortably; others feel like clothes we spend a lifetime trying to alter.

I can remember being absolutely furious as a teenager when my sister-in-law introduced me as “Bill’s sister, Helen.” I remember thinking, why am I being defined by the relationship first? Why couldn’t I simply be Helen, who also happened to be Bill’s sister? Ever since then, I have been very conscious of naming the person first, before the relationship. People are not extensions of other people. They are themselves.

Which is perhaps why I struggle so much with remembering students’ names.

Well, that’s not quite true. I know their names. I know their faces. The problem is attaching the names to the faces. Faces are easy. People take time.

A face tells you what someone looks like. A person reveals who they are: their humour, their interests, their strengths, their worries, the way they think, the stories they tell, and the way they interact with the world. It is only when I begin to know those things that a name settles properly into place.

I don’t really attach names to faces. I attach names to people.

This semester, with my fourth-year mathematics specialism pre-service teachers, I realised that after years of seeing them only once a week for a few hours each semester, I can finally remember most of their names. Not because I have suddenly become better at memorising faces, but because I now know who they are.

A face alone means very little to me. What matters is the person attached to it:

• the student who suddenly understands proportional reasoning,
• the one who lacks confidence but keeps trying,
• the quiet one with the dry sense of humour,
• the student who asks brilliant sideways questions,
• the one who shakes your hand when they first meet you and immediately gives you a sense of who they are.

Once I understand something of the person, the name settles naturally into place. Before that, it is just a label attached to a moving blur that I see once a week for three hours over ten weeks, before they disappear again for six months.

It takes time to know people.

That is why names matter so much to me. A name is never just a label. It carries identity, personality, history, memory, and story. Once those things exist, the name becomes real.

And possibly that is also why, after four years with this group of future teachers, I can finally remember who everybody is.

After all these years of wearing the name, I have made peace with being Helen.

Not Helena. Not Lena. Not Nell.

Just Helen. Helen S Booth. The ‘S’ is important because there are many, many Helen Booths, but there is only one Helen Stewart Booth. There are Helen Booths, Helen Stewarts, but only one Helen Stewart Booth.

And perhaps that name has become interesting not because of what it means, but because of the life that has gradually grown around it.

I have been:

• Hen,
• Hell,
• Lenny,
• hel’n’commentary,
• hel’n’damnation,
• 2hel’n’bac
• teacher,
• traveller,
• researcher,
• consultant,
• widow,
• storyteller.

Perhaps the name stayed the same, but I’ve accumulated a great many versions of myself around it.

Thinking about names and faces reminded me of an activity I use with pre-service teachers involving Cuisenaire rods and what we call a “Hundred Face” (Find a lesson plan from AMSI here)

For those unfamiliar with Cuisenaire rods, they are coloured mathematical rods with values ranging from 1 (a white cube) through to 10 (an orange stick equivalent in length to 10 white cubes). The challenge for the PSTs is to create a face using rods that add to a total value of 100.

Initially, we make fairly basic faces, but then I add a rider: they must include at least one rod of every colour. Suddenly the task becomes much more interesting. They now need to think much more carefully about combinations, values, structure, and checking totals. The faces become more complex, more creative, and far more individual.

What fascinates me is how quickly personality emerges from arrangements of simple mathematical objects. The rods themselves are just coloured wooden blocks, yet somehow students create faces with expressions, moods, and character. Some faces look cheerful, some mischievous, some startled, some thoughtful. It is amazing how quickly we begin to see identity in patterns and relationships.

Why do I use this activity with PSTs? Primarily because they are future primary teachers, and this is an activity that can easily be adapted for a Year 1 classroom as part of a unit on place value and numbers to 120.

At the beginning of the unit, students can create a Hundred Face as a form of pre-assessment. The way they construct the face tells you a great deal about their mathematical thinking. Some children use very simple constructions and rely heavily on smaller rods or repeated combinations. Others demonstrate more sophisticated understanding of grouping, equivalence, and efficient combinations.

Then, at the end of the unit, students complete the task again, this time with the additional condition that they must use at least one rod of every colour. Suddenly they are required to think much more deeply about how numbers can be composed and recomposed to make 100, while also needing to justify and check their thinking.

What I love most, though, is that the activity becomes about far more than simply reaching 100. Somewhere in the middle of mathematical thinking, coloured rods begin turning into personalities.

Perhaps that is not entirely unlike learning people’s names.