Professional Ponderings

According to James D. Williams (Preparing to Teach Writing ) the inherent issue in our students’ writing difficulties lies in the fact that we the teachers just don’t plan ahead. “More often than not, teachers put together a writing assignment the night before they give it to students, and it is commonly unrelated to any instruction that preceded it (280).”

Now I will admit that I have been in classrooms where an assignment did not have meaning, but I honestly do not think that this is due to lack of planning. If it does occur it is a much smaller occurrence than “[m]ore often than not”. If you are expecting English and writing teachers to take you seriously, Williams, you might want to give us more credit, learn about how our job works and then write more respectfully.

Speaking of writing respectfully, or the lack there of, Williams blew past the line of writing professionally when he slammed the then Council of writing program administrators’ president Kathleen Yancey. I really do not care why Williams could not get a permission letter to publish the Outcomes statement, 1999 in his book but it is a sign of complete lack of professional judgement to sarcastically print that “Kathleen Yancey, was such an important person that she was far too busy to write a one page permission letter allowing us to reproduce the outcomes statement here (usually deemed a simple matter of professional courtesy) (281).” Obviously Williams needs to rethink his idea of what professional courtesy is. It would have been appropriate to state that at time of publishing they did not have permission to print the statement, or that what followed was a summary of the statement. In either scenario sarcastic cheep shots are eliminated.

Moving away from the way Williams says things, he has an interesting perspective on the purpose of high school writing courses. “At the public school level, goals must include preparing students to write at the college level, which means that objectives must reference students’ ability to produce the kind of writing required at university (280).” This is a rather loaded statement, and it puts much responsibility on the teachers, whose ability to prep for class will be judged as extremely lacking in the next paragraph.

My question back to Williams’ statement is: is it our job to prepare students for college or for life? If we are to prepare students for college, what type of writing would that entail? Will the student be going to a college that prefers the good-old five paragraph essay? Or will his school be working in multi-genre, multi-modal forms of writing? Will he be majoring in journalism , strategic communications, English, business, science, art?

When Williams makes this grandiose claim, and others throughout his text, it would be helpful to offer evidence rather than simply his opinion.

Finally the sequence of writing that is presented in chapter 9 feels to be rather arbitrary. “Report of events, report of information, interpretation of events, interpretation of information, evaluation of events, fiction, auto-biography.” This sequence implies that there is no give and take of writing genres and that they are not fluid. Also he is sure that non-fiction writing is easier than fiction or auto-biography. I don’t agree that you can put a generalized scale of difficulty on types of writing.

I will end this rather long post with a shocker; I actually do agree with one thing Williams talked about in this chapter. That there is value and learning opportunities in doing research to write about things that you are not familiar with.