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April 07, 2005
tj 205: week 11
conferencing is (feels like?) a weakness of mine.
i don't know if my students know this. i try to be friendly and accessible, and from their responses i think i succeed at that. what i'm less sure of is whether or not i succeed at actually doing or saying anything truly valuable while they're here.
this round wasn't my favorite kind, at least in terms of being able to point to having accomplished anything, although it's much less work: they came in for each a required conference to talk over their research paper plans at the point in the process where they'd done a lot of research, gathered sources, started annotating them for a bibliography due tomorrow, but hadn't really started writing yet. the point was to talk through what was working, what trouble they were running into, what concerns they had about what might be going to work or not work.
when they bring texts, especially when they send me texts to look at beforehand, i have concrete things to talk about. this way i was mostly just listening, identifying potential problems, giving advice about outlining, getting them to talk through potential organizational plans... which, in retrospect, doesn't actually sound bad at all.
but i know there are people out there who are really organized about it, who have scripts & questions to ask everybody, have a list of things to make sure they do, have detailed plans & cover o-so-much-ground... whereas i'm basically chit-chatting.
fortunately, i happen to be a firm believer in the virtue of social interaction as an element of invention. chit-chatting is officially (as of right this minute) part of my pedagogy!
tomorrow i'll go observe a few of dave's conferences & see how he does it differently.
Posted by ttobryan at April 7, 2005 07:22 PM
Comments
I'll bet you're not really chit-chatting. Because if someone who thinks deeply about writing is chit-chatting with a writing student about a forthcoming writing project, chances are something more is going on. In fact, if you just say, "So tell me what you're thinking about your project," you're off on the chase.
Of course, if you're talking about food and the weather, that's chit-chatting. But even then, I believe there's a space to be made simply for relating to your students.
I say this because, if you sat in on my conferences, you'd probably think we were chit-chatting. And sometimes we are.
Posted by: hj at April 9, 2005 04:41 PM