Grammar Hell

After reading William's chapter six I am apprehensive once again of the topic of grammar. I have never been a big fan of grammar learning and I didn't even know how I would go about teaching grammar to my students. I was a bit confused about what Williams was trying to get at in his chapter. He claims that most problems in writing are due to problems with usage not grammar itself. I think he was advocating for teachers to teach correct grammar usage to their students.

However, there are many students who don't know grammar at all and I still think that it is an important thing to teach. If a student doesn't know what a semi-colon is for, for example, then the student probably needs a lesson in grammar. If I have student who is constantly using commas incorrectly, then we have a usage problem and I would more than happy to help them learn the correct way of using it. I guess I just didn't understand what Williams was trying to say in his writing. He kept coming back to the fact that none of the ways of teaching grammar helps students in their writing. I would be more interested in hearing more about ways of teaching grammar that actual helped students learn. I still think that having a solid, basic knowledge of grammar along with correct usage is important. In my English classroom, though I think the aspects of writing that would be most vital to me is making sure that my students are getting their ideas out onto the paper, not whether they used the "correct" sentence structure or not.

My website for this week is a site filled with what I'm sure Williams would deem as useless grammar help and definitions.
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/