Assessing and Evaluating-- or, why I will never teach

In this chapter, Williams describes exactly the confusion I face when I read over my peers' papers or when I attempt to write one myself. Sadly, the first thing I consider as a student is usually the professor-- do I know the professor? what does she/he like? will she/he allow me to resubmit this for a better grade?

As a professor, however, I do not know how I would grade writing reliably so that it would be "consistent across evaluators and across time" (304). To me, this seems like a lot of pressure. Before reading this chapter, I assumed that, if by chance I do become an English teacher down the road, I could simply form my own "taste" for writing and grade accordingly. After all, this is how I have learned to write-- with evaluators and their different tastes in mind first and foremost. Williams calls this type of behavior out in Chapter 16, and he has made me glad once again that I am not pursuing a career in education. My assumptions about teaching were all wrong. And I had a feeling they were.

Another aspect of teaching that Williams points out, and that I am glad to avoid, is the workload. I have recently dug through a bunch of my papers I have written throughout college, and I have found exactly the types of comments Williams describes on page 315: little comments scribbled in the margins, then a paragraph at the end that seems to begin in a celebratory tone-- stating the positives of my paper-- and then shift to a more constructive tone to describe my weaknesses.

Overall, I found that Williams once again spends the majority of this chapter's pages to tearing down the traditional writing pedagogy with which I am most familiar. He then proceeds to offer research supporting his claims, and then he finally offers better methods for assessing and evaluating writing. I must admit that I like his suggestions for improvement. I was glad to see that I have experienced some of these improved methods in several classes. I like the idea of universal grading for writing, and I believe that Williams's suggestions could steer future teachers toward a reliable scale.