Conroy, P. (1972). The Water is Wide. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Chp. 9 and 10
The sentence that I picked from chapter nine is "I soon decided that any human that had not been entombed on Yamacraw since birth had a vast repository of experience to share in my classroom" (p182). I liked this sentence because it shows another way that Conroy was trying to educate his students, and introduce them to the outside world. In this chapter Conroy has a bunch of different people with their own take on the world, and each with different backgrounds come and talk to the students. Some of these people left a very strong impression on the children, such as Conroy's sister and Peter. The sentence that I picked from chapter ten is "What fired the imagination of my students one week bored and stultified them the next" (p210). In this chapter Conroy discusses how you need to keep the material interesting so that the students did not get bored. As a way of trying to keep things interesting Conroy petitioned for a trip to Washington D.C. after he found a letter from a woman in Virginia. After he got permission from all of the parents and got transportation along with a few chaperones, he loaded up the students and took them to Washington. Once there the students were given a tour of a number of museums and monuments, but the one place they really seemed to enjoy was the zoo. All of the animals excited them. They also enjoyed staying with the families who boarded them while they were in Virginia, as well playing with the children in the neighborhood. The trip was a educational and exciting experience for the students.
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I though Conroy’s methods of sharing the outside world with the students by allowing guest speakers was both a good and risky. To do this you must make sure that the person who is speaking has had enough experiences in life to be able to give a clear perspective on how they were effective by things they faced in a negative to positive way. I thought he touched on a interesting discovery of how he knew he was done in Yamacraw by talking about how he didn’t find the road lines enough to talk about. Teachers should be able to find a learning lesson in every thing. I think this shows how Conroy new he could not continue being any kind of help to the students on the island.
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