Is it unreasonable to expect excellent grammar, punctuation and spelling from school?

[AJ65]

A year 5 play uses 'motive' as a verb, as in 'he knows how to motive his people', uses 'its' where it should be 'it's' and 'your' where it should be 'you're'!! Then they sent out an email about a 'sponsered walk'!! I'm appalled!!

Would our kids be allowed to get away with such poor performance?

wasonthelist: Cue (que) a load of "it dunt matter if yow can undersd it do it? comments.

Yy. And the (almost compulsory,) 'language is constantly eviolving' comments.

You have to remember that many teachers are around my age now (30 ish) and we fell into the curriculum gap where grammar was not considered important.

^^ This. I was coming on to say this.

I do think it's importation though especially as they are marked on this in exams now.

Personally I find it very annoying when people say to me children on "I can't spell and it doesn't matter".

I'm a terrible speller and I've found it does matter and people make judgement about you based on your spelling and grammar - and we have spent time and money trying to ensure our children do know their punctuation, grammar and trying to correct spelling. It's not great to have adults lie to the children and demotivate them from trying doing better even if the sentiment is meant to be nice.

Having said that - school correspondence that make some kind of sense and/or have the correct information on are more importation and sadly IME isn't always there.

Maybe hypocritical isn't the right word; how about double standards? If children are expected to check their work and get it right, so should teachers!

Good grief. Who wrote the play? That's among the worst of the many grammatical mistakes I've read about on MN.

There's an article somewhere on the internet about the loss of very intelligent females to the teaching profession as a result of formerly male-only jobs being opened up to women in the 20th century.

There's an article somewhere on the internet about the loss of very intelligent females to the teaching profession as a result of formerly male-only jobs being opened up to women in the 20th century.

I don't think this explains it. My children's Oxbridge-educated teachers have sent home some fairly egregious errors. Oxbridge must surely be a reliable indicator of intelligence.