How to get better at remembering names?

One thing that I am really bad at is remembering names. I guess I should go ahead and tell a story about this… Thinks back to middle school / high school, since it is a very good example…

So, back whenever I was in middle school (that sentence makes me sound old), I was in a homeroom of ~30 people, who all shared almost the same schedule. Even though I conversed with all of them on a regular basis for about 180 days, by the end of the year, I still didn’t know some of their names.

More recently, some of my friends, whose names I do know, where talking about memory and I mentioned that I was bad with names. So one of them pointed out a whole bunch of people and told me their names. I have forgotten all of those names except for one, who offered me a mnemonic to remember her name with. I am pretty sure most people don’t use mnemonics to help remember names.

So, what can I do to fix this?