Homeschool & new stuff e.g. fronted adverbials

[Andrea87]

I wonder how many adults are learning new things that children have to know nowadays by helping them with school work at the moment ?
Do you think what good does it do that an 8 year old knows about fronted adverbials and can spot them from a mile away? How useful is this going to be in later life?
What is the most useless / confusing thing your children is learning?
You might be enjoying finding out new Ideas and your school may be brilliant at explaining new concepts to parents and carers or you might be having to find out how to teach this yourself. There seems to be a huge disparity with school support.
So am I being unreasonable that I think there are more important concepts than for example a fronted adverbial for an 8 year old to know? Or you might even love them and think I am talking rubbish here.

@StacySoloman

The Conservatives are really into grammar terminology for some reason

I didn’t learn any grammar terms at school and still managed to get a degree etc, but could probably have done with a little more explicit grammar teaching.

However the Tories do seem to have sacrificed creativity in favour of lifeless grammar analysis.

They're really into grammar terminology because Michael Gove (and Boris, TBH) like evoking all that Latin lessons/public schools/British history for British boys kind of bullshit.

It is a subtle (or not so subtle) way of conveying that rigour is the same thing as rote learning (so much easier when you teach the plebs not to question things). We don't want to be learning grammar through foreign languages, as past generations on the whole did, we want to learn grammar through good old English. And if there aren't enough grammatical terms, or it'd be a bit awkward to advertise the fact that most grammar teaching until now has been based on bad adaptations from Latin, we'll scrape the bottom of the barrel and find some. Like 'fronted adverbial'.

Then we will encourage the middle classes to smile smugly and talk about how important grammar is for Good English Writing.

Ha ha Eileen QC - only 6? Yeah you suck😂
It wasn’t what I said though - just that adults are poor in comparison to children, or most are.

Haven't RTFT but I had a full on toddler style tantrum over fronted adverbials back in March. At 34 years old I just could not get my head around them and seemed to have a total mind blank when it came to them. I'm convinced they didn't exist 25 years ago!

We move on to fractions and then homeschool was swiftly abandoned that day.

Anyone used to watch 'are you smarter than a 10 year old?'? No. No I am not.

Perhaps they hadn't bee invented when I was at school. It was the 60s, lots of things hadn't been invented back then.

People used them in the sixties and every decade before and every decade since. It’s just wanky terminology to describe starting a sentence with an adverb.