This study investigates the dialogic processes involved in how teachers talk about their students and what consequences their ways of talking (i.e., "narratives") may have for their guidance. We take a sociocultural perspective on learning as transformation of students' subjectivity. Teaching, as a process of guiding and facilitating learning, cannot be effective if the teacher does not actively seek how the student perceives and understands reality. We borrow and adapt from Bakhtin (1999) four narrative ways of talking about others: objectivizing, subjectivizing, problematizing and finalizing. The presence of these narratives in web discussion postings of our pre-service teachers about the Latino children they worked with in a community center are analyzed. We then compare their ways of talking about children with print- and web-based discussions about children made by in-service teachers, model teachers and our pre-service teachers in a school-based practicum. Using mixed quantitative and qualitative methodologies, we found an overwhelming predominance of objectivizing and finalizing in our pre-service teachers' narratives about the children with whom they work that seems to define a certain pedagogical regime that we call here "teaching imaginary children/students." This "way of talking" about children seems to be characterized by unchecked speculations guiding instruction that are not tested by finding out from the children themselves how they understand the instruction and the world. These speculations, in turn, can lead to a dogmatic approach towards children. We found another model of teaching/learning in ways that model teachers talk about their students based on a "community of learners" approach to instruction. This approach prioritizes subjectivizing and problematizing of students that can help to recursively correct the assumptions and preconceptions teachers may have of their students. Our own pre-service teachers were increasingly likely to subjectivize the Latino children over the course of the 9-week practicum. We suggest that the promotion of subjectivizing and problematizing of students should become a central part of the curriculum of pre-service teacher preparation and in-service teacher professional development programs. Without talking and listening to their students, teachers cannot know how the students think, feel, and perceive the world and themselves; in turn, it is very difficult for teachers to engage in collaboration with their students about learning. ...a teacher cannot know or describe her relation with students using her consistent monological voice; there can be no truth in such knowledge. However, the teacher can present a dialogue between the students and herself, which presents different but engaged and dynamic opinions about the relations. The polyphonic knowledge is one where the other is made present (Sidorkin, 2002, pp. 98-99). Evil is objectifying the other, taking an utterly monological stance toward the other (Sidorkin, 2002, p. 186) [Sidorkin, A.M. (2002). Learning relations: Impure education, deschooled schools, & dialogue with evil. New York: P. Lang].