Several Little Thoughts

After this Monday's class,I fell into kind of meditation about what exactly graduate classes look like and what actually American way of study should be,then I suddenly realized that since I have already been in America and been a member of the graduate class,I should let my ways of thinking and expressing be more likely to the ways of Americans--that is ,feel free to express one's own thoughts and opinions no matter what they are--which is indeed good to learn for a Chinese student, I, who once is too shy to do.

After the class I reread the books carefully and this time I found myself something eager to say about what I have read.

Nothing, it seemed, short of a miracle was going to turn such students into writers. Not uncommonly, teachers announced to their supervisors (or even their students) after only a week of class that everyone was probably going to fail. It comes from page three in Errors &Expectations. These sentences throwed me into somewhere else I read before:You are not what you look like at present, but are what others think you can be and should be.To my opinion, the students came from various academic backgrounds surely had a countless number of problems and errors in their writings,but that was common and natural-- some just had very little or poor education in the previous years of their lives. As teachers, since they had to face these kinds of students, their obligation and responsibility was to firstly find out what the students' problems or common errors were and then try their utmost to help them improve step by step, little by little. Among this long process, the most important guideline lied in that teachers must first of all have a strong sense of confidence in their students,secondly encourage them to build up the same strong sense of confidence in themselves--they can improve, they can write well or even excellently! How can teachers make this? My advice is that they can achieve it simply through thinking that all students are good at writing after a process of proper training and instruction, through telling them that they are making a progress, and also through trusting their ability and encouraging them all the time! Then you will see one day they will become the good writers that you for a long time thought they would become someday!!
Isn't it the happiest thing in your life that because of your optimistic attitude toward the seemingly helpless students and also your constant efforts, you finally turn them into the shining gold?

work cited

Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.