To find some Primary School teaching a bit pointless?

[Schooll]

Every other day my child brings home homework asking her to identify a new type of pronoun, adjective etc.

My friend is over today too and we both work in fields that require a good standard of English. We cannot understand why we are still stressing children out with things like ‘identify the relative pronoun’, what use is this information?

Genuinely, when will my child ever need to know this and why is she spending so much time stressing over the different types when it’s unlikely to ever be needed again, unless she becomes a primary school teacher?

Am I missing something where this sort of information is actually really useful and we should still be using it to judge children’s intelligence in exams etc?

Thank Gove. He decided that's what kids needed to learn. State schools have to teach what's in the National Curriculum which is decided by politicians not teachers.

A political decision rather than an education one. Complain to the government.

Gove brought in this (slightly bizarre) emphasis on unusual aspects of grammar.

What they all said. Have they done 'fronted adverbials' yet?

Primary teacher - I have a separate degree in an essay subject and high standard of written English (worked in copywriting etc before teaching) but I STILL have to re teach myself all this rubbish each time I get put back into Y6 to teach grammar. Absolutely daft.

Definitely not blaming the teachers or schools, more just curious as to why this is the norm and if it’s actually useful!
The Govt is so out of touch.
I just don’t understand why we need to categorise words in so many different ways, surely time would be better spent on spellings, punctuation etc.

We never had to learn any of this.

But I've been told it might help if they have to learn a foreign language???

So they know what a pronoun is etc. when learning french or spanish.

A lot of it is just checking - does this sentence make sense.

We are working on a lot of this for 11 plus prep. But I think in Secondary school they don't care as much????

I completely agree. A good level of written English is important.

Unfortunately, Michael Gove seemed to want to implement grammatical phrases that he thought were commonplace in the 1950s and needed to be reinstated. My parents went to grammar schools in the 50s and did oodles of sentence parsing and never studied ‘fronted adverbials of time’ or ‘expanded noun phrases’ or any such crap.

I want children to enjoy school and have a love of reading and writing and not be bored of it by the age of 6. The primary curriculum needs a total rethink.

I was an English teacher and ATM I home school. I honestly don't fill my child's head with that crap.
Why do we need to write persuasive speeches and learn anomalies or similies?
I teach her what's important for life, like writting letters and sending emails.
Just like what do we need to learn Algebra. When do we use it?

If it helps, most primary school teachers are in agreement with you 😂 we hate teaching this crap. there is something to be said for having a shared language for talking about writing so when giving feedback the child understands what you’re trying to say (your sentences could be improved by using conjunctions to make them complex instead of simple, or try using adverbs to describe the verbs) but it goes too far.

I teach primary maths and there’s definitely elements of that I’d ditch and leave to senior school. Roman numerals past 100 is mostly a waste of time, and a lot of the fractions objectives are just too hard for a chunk of the kids (adding and subtracting mixed numbers, multiplying and dividing fractions…even if they can understand the method they rarely actually understand what 5/6 x 2/3 or 1/6 divided by 7 actually means).

It's just general knowledge and has always been taught. People ought to know the difference between a noun and an adjective. It's pretty basic really.

I have an A level in English and I was never taught most of it. It’s so dull! It’s really unnecessary to teach it to primary-aged children when the time could be spent improving their vocabulary and reading skills.

Yes the level of SPAG that year 6s need to know is absurd. I am a primary school teacher with English language A level and 4 years of university, plus 16 years of teaching, and I still find some of the SPAG tricky. Had to teach the past perfect tense the other day and looked it up first! Not only is it very tricky for kids to understand, the time it takes to try to teach it could be used teaching something that is actually useful, fun and creative! I think primary school should be more about fostering a love of learning, rather than shoving grammar down children's necks.

Are you a year 6 teacher?

It's absolutely bizarre. I home educate, but follow the curriculum (for some stuff) I'm going to abandon all of this nonsense. We spent last week learning all of these terms and I have to say, I have to keep looking them up again to remind myself. My kids already write well and have a good command of grammar, without learning the names of concepts that they already know. When they come to do their GCSEs, they can relearn all of these terms a few months before. The time would be better spent actually doing creative writing. Complete waste of time in primary. I feel sorry for the teachers!

It’s not just noun, adjective and verb anymore. It’s much more than that.

It goes far beyond nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. It's absurd.

Our Year 1s know adjective, noun and verb.

My son can't read or write but can identify a noun and an adjective. Seems totally backwards to me!

Ah ha ha ha ha.

It's not adjective, noun, verb.

It's relative pronoun, fronted adverbial, modal verb, present vs past progressive.

And then they go up into secondary and it's never mentioned again. Pointless.

I've got 2 degrees, a job that requires a high degree of literacy yet hadn't got a clue about these names of grammatical things, nor maths - I learnt things intuitively and never learned phonics either, wasn't the thing in the 70's. It's such a waste of time

I’m from an era where grammar wasn’t taught explicitly. I remember going into language lessons at secondary school and no one in the class knew what a noun or a verb was, etc. so our French teacher gave us a 10 minute lesson in basic English grammar. I assume that there was a perception at the time that standards of written and spoken English were poor, and that the remedy was to bamboozle everyone with fronted adverbials and the like.

Just like what do we need to learn Algebra. When do we use it?

Algebra is one of the fundamental building blocks of maths, basic algebra is an absolute essential. My 5yo is learning how to make up amounts with different coins, that's algebra.

I did a level English and German, the German teachers gave us grammar lessons as we didn't know any of it. That meant I was the only one who knew about grammar when it came to my English degree.

I think Gove imagined it would be like kids learning Latin where the grammar is complex. These politicians never send their own kids to state schools.

That's not what the OP was about. Verbs, nouns and adjectives are quite simple. Some of the National Curriculum requirements in Grammar are quite ridiculous at such a young age. I went to an old fashioned grammar school in the 1960s and I'd never heard of some of it.