jaimie k's reflection to graves ch. 12...

Conferences sound like an awesome idea, but Graves makes them sound so simple. He gives examples of how conferences might go with a teacher and a student; but the truth is that there are so many possibilities of how the conference might go. What if instead of answering the teachers’ questions, the student just replies with “I don’t knows.” In the first selection, Gregory writes about “wepins.” In the first conference the teacher asks him to read what he has and asks him what he’s going to do next. What if instead, he just says “I don’t know.” Then the teacher might ask him questions like in the next conferences, “where did you learn so much about the topic?”, “what did you have in mind when you first started writing this?” and so on. Still the student can answer with “I don’t knows.” Some students are like that. It’s hard to get a straight answer out of them. They might be shy or just not confident in their writing. It may take several minutes for them to finally open up to you. And every conference might start off like this. What do you do then?

Second of all, I know we aren’t supposed to “steer their topics” or “interrupt their writing,” but isn’t Gregory’s topic a bit violent? He wants to write about killing Germans; isn’t that extreme?

I hate to be a pessimist, but things can’t and won’t always go as smoothly as Graves’ examples in the book. Already I know we are all experiencing the difficulties of trying to apply what we learn at the university to our time in the elementary classroom. Everything seems and sounds so simple when it’s being explained to us. We learn how we’re supposed to do things, but it’s always a different situation in the real classroom. We can’t learn how to handle every circumstance; I guess we just learn from real-life experiences and we’ll continue to learn our entire career.