After completing the reading, I had an overwhelming feeling that I had just been led somewhere and not in a good way. I agree with Rachael in that she said that Williams writes with a heavy bias. There was an undertone in his writing that seems to say “this is bad” or “this is good.” This week’s reading has a lot of information to process, so I’m just going to touch on a few of the things that made me stop reading in order to think about what I had just read. In other words, things that made me go hmmm.
At the very beginning of the reading, Williams says that “A commonplace in education is that most teachers teach the way they themselves were taught. Education classes are designed, in part, to provide an alternative based on research and theory, but they are not always successful in moving teachers away from methods based on their own experiences.” (42) Williams goes on to say that because there are so many approaches to writing instruction that teachers find it difficult to get through it all and instead decide to fall back on their own experiences as students. This actually felt like a thinly veiled insult to teachers by saying they don’t want to do the work but instead opt for the easiest way to teach. I will be the first to admit that there were many teaching methods that my own teachers used that were less than ideal, however, there were many that were stellar. It goes back to that bag of tricks that was mentioned in other blogs; we need a variety of tools in order to teach a variety of students. Using only one type of teaching on a class of individuals with different learning styles just isn’t going to be successful. We need to have alternatives available for students whose learning style differs from the “norm,” and it is quite possible that something from my own experience as a student may serve that purpose. If you think about it, there was something in the methods of my teachers that helped me become a good writer.
There were elements in the reading that I did like as well. When describing the failure probability of the cookbook approach to writing, Williams states that “The five paragraph model not only has no real counterpart outside the classroom but also inevitably leads to the sort of shallow, unreflective writing that we all decry as the plague of American public education.” (46) I couldn’t agree more. Recently, I had to write a group of essays for my writing portfolio requirement. One of these essays had several broad topics to choose from, however, we were limited to 1-2 pages. This was by far the hardest, and ultimately, the cheesiest paper I’ve ever written. I had many good, well-thought out ideas for the topic, but because of the constraints on space I barely even touched on a few of these ideas. In my opinion, the best instruction for length of papers is that it should be as long as it needs to be.
Overall, I felt that Williams writes with a bit of an elitist attitude. I did like some things that he included, such as the universal features that all good writers share, but again I really felt like he was leading me and I took offense to several entries such as this quote that followed a section on a study of “Black” English,“… many people believed that if teachers just offered more of both (grammar and logic instruction), the barbarians pouring through the gates of academe would become civilized.” (50)
So, Williams made me think, made me a little angry, and made me go hmmm.
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