11/28/11: Reflection

We began our 11/28 meeting with a VTS , as usual.  Maria did the honors while I manned the camera.  The image was a knights on horseback battle scene and the boys enjoyed it but I was surprised by how they kept their comments focused on relatively few details/areas of the image considering the widescreen excitement.  VTS was followed by a quick review of the life and times of knights the codes by which they lived, which was handled by Mary.  After that, the boys began to work on drawings and stats for the page and squire to accompany the knights that they’d already created the week before (when I was absent).

Having already done the knight activity, the boys seemed to have little trouble conceptualizing their pages and squires though O said that he’d already made his knight 10 or 11 years old.  He tried to suggest that the activity just wouldn’t work for him.  It wasn’t difficult to suggest that he could either change the age of his knight later on or that the page and squire could just be different characters altogether.  However, O wanted to argue about this until Mr T made it clear with a stern look that he expected O to create a page and a squire.  I’m still not sure what O’s motivations are when he tries to talk his way out of a task.  He has plenty of ideas and his drawing and writing are very confident even though he rarely gets very much of it down on the page.  It’s as though he’s mostly just interested in the opportunity to talk.

W continues to be the opposite of O in this respect, although he seems to have become more confident in his conversations with me as year has gone on.   He’s still very quiet and while he rarely hesitates to respond any more, he never initiates conversation.  I feel more and more that W gets hung up on doing things correctly.  I noticed that he seemed to do a lot of erasing and redrawing during this day’s activity and he only wrote one line.  I wonder if his hesitation to write is because he’s concerned about spelling things correctly.  I’m going to try to encourage him to “take notes” and emphasize the rough draft quality of the sketchbook so that he doesn’t feel as constrained by his formal concerns.