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?

I think it's useful to know what a noun, pronoun, adjective, verb etc are because it helps to describe language and learn a second language. All this "fronted adverbial" shite is not needed and, quite frankly, invented.

It’s taught because most of this stuff comes up in their SAT’s.

I’m 44 and was taught onomatopoeia in my primary school in a very low income area.

My children were all 4 when they learnt it at school but they were all quite quick readers. Honestly, purely talking from experience of what they’re like when they come in in year 7, the grammar they’re expected to do is utterly ridiculous. It’s definitely not making a mountain out of a molehill. They come in knowing loads of terms they are never going to need (like fronted adverbials) but they can’t write in paragraphs, use a semi-colon or apostrophe correctly or spell a single homophone. Priorities are seriously skewed.

For expected level readers, it's autumn term of Y1 so a few children will be 6 but most 5. They will certainly be covered in reception by some able 4 year olds.

No, what has to be taught now is not general knowledge and certainly wasn't taught previously. I went to a good grammar school in the fifties - loved English language as a subject, became a teacher - and I've never even heard of many of the things the government is now demanding primary children learn. Parsing was never taught until secondary school, and only in grammar schools was it taught in great detail.
Out of interest I did look up the meaning of one or two of these parts of speech Gove thought so important - realised how useless an exercise it was, and am truly grateful that I've long since retired. My great grandchildren unfortunately have it to face, unless a government with common sense appears

We accept - in science, in maths, in geography, in RE, in music, in PSHE - that a large part of education (particularly primary education) is simply about being able to apply the right labels to things. But for some reason try to do that with English and people think it's going too far!

I expect part of it is not so much that the children find it especially difficult, but that it's the one area where parents who never received this sort of education themselves are out of their depth.

I actually love grammar. To me, it's the equivalent of advanced maths! I could point out that a lot of maths terms can be equally baffling such as "number bonds" and even though kids don't use those terms, they need to know how to use number bonds. The same goes for grammatical terms. Children need to identify the parts which make writing clear and understandable (what word in which order etc...). They might not need to know it's a fronted adverbial but they might want to use one to emphasise a part of their sentence...
I love writing/reading and I have started reading a couple of books recently where the grammar was pretty bad. It completely turned me off reading them.

I'm a primary school teacher and I don't see the need at all. Some of the terms I learnt because I have to teach it and not before.

That's some flex.

Bold to admit this.

Good grammar, spelling and use of English is a darn sight more important than algebra . I'm 75, a Scot. By the way our Scots education system is run by us, not Westminster. It's totally separate.I was taught cursive handwriting, I do text etc. It doesn't matter, if we don't keep the standards up, god help us. Mass illiteracy!

Almost all Year 6 teachers would freely admit this.

I went to Oxford University and wrote essays in my undergrad and postgraduate degrees there, but I didn't know what the subjunctive mood, model verbs or past progressive tense were until 2014 when the government decides thet were vital for 11 year olds to master. They're easy concepts but I can't help but think there are more crucial aspects of grammar for children of this age.

Making learning such a chore is, in my opinion, counter-productive. I think children learn through reading, with guidance when needed, and enjoying what they read. There perhaps is an argument for such analytical reading at some stage but I think primary school is too early.

I'm sure many people can remember having to pore over, and analyse, texts when they were at school, which completely took the joy out of reading. I hated Shakespeare at school because we never got the chance to read text as a whole but had to stop and pull to pieces every sentence. When I was older, I read Shakespeare at my own pace and, though I didn't understand everything, I was able to get the gist of the plot and the characters.