Williams Chapter 3

What a relief! Williams has gone from failed teaching methods in the last chapter to how to rectify the dire teaching situation in this chapter. His excerpt on Rita was an eye opener. Here was a student who was struggling in her classes. Williams’ focus was on the teacher’s writing assignments as well as the student’s half-hearted efforts on projects that can be easily viewed as busy work. Rita’s writing ability improved greatly not from “years of writing instruction” (122) but from assignments that actually involved an audience outside of her writing teacher. Her willingness to research and to put forth effort shows that she was not a substandard student because of inability but rather because of lack of motivation. I wonder if Rita’s teacher took the initiative to attend a workshop on effective assignments because of Williams’ classroom observation or if she would have gone regardless. Either way it shows that her traditional methods that she had relied on over her teaching career were deficient. She attended the workshop and actually applied the methods that were given.
Thinking back to one of the philosophy classes that I had taken, I remember one of the logical fallacies was arguing that something is right because it has been done for so long or that’s the way its always been done. Educational systems were set in place and implemented for so long that it would take a complete overhaul of the system to put forth the drastic measures that are necessary to make students into better writers. Writers who place content first and worry about errors later. Teachers who learn how to grade for content and who are willing to allow students to correct and make changes to papers long after the papers are turned in. Grading that takes into consideration more than just correct punctuation and grammar but focuses on meaningful content.