Thank you for your question! It is important to share our memories, our dreams, especially in these times when everything is changing and we feel a little lost.
I remember many things from my school days, I remember very well the "atmosphere", the smell of pencils, erasers, my first notebooks... although I remember few classmates.
My memories are rather visual, faces, silhouettes, games during recess, especially the big rounds that we formed singing at the top of our lungs, happy to be able to change the rules of the lessons for those of each song or game. It is true that in my school I did not meet my neighbors, because they all went to private schools, and my classmates came from farther away, walking sometimes about 1 km. The girls who came to our public school lived in poorer neighborhoods, while my little neighbors who had a public school 200 meters away, went by car to private schools in more distant neighborhoods.
I remember only a few names of my classmates, but I remember very well my teacher, her face, her name and surname, whom I always admired very much, with her I had the opportunity to learn many things, and she also appreciated me.
Regarding your question about memory, it seems to me that each person is different, some of us are more visual, others remember sounds, music, or events that marked them, such as a birthday, a show, etc. Then I think that it is not easy to relate a face with a name, since the face is "stored" in the visual memory, while the name is in the auditory memory, or maybe it can also be in the visual memory if you remember better having seen it written. Well, and that happens to all of us, we have access to certain memories, and many others escape us.
Besides, it turns out that I have been able to recover some of my childhood memories, since I started writing them down so that my children can read them later, when they feel the need. And I can tell you that as I began to write, new memories that I had forgotten came back to me. Maybe if you were to describe your school, for example, and everything you remember automatically, it could help you to put together a face with a name, and that would be a first step.