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?

It's far more than that!
However teachers need to also blame their predecessors of the 60s and 70s who were as extreme in the opposite direction when grammar, like multiplication tables, was unfashionable so not taught. What's happening now is an attempt to redress that imbalance, hopefully some sense may prevail!
I taught Maths to A level but also taught a few years in Primary.

Agree...if there is an academy near you, the curriculum is decided by parents and teachers instead.

It hasn't always been taught. Are you familiar with the content that is actually covered? It goes way beyond nouns and adjectives!

Whilst academy trusts don't have to follow the national curriculum, this doesn't mean it's set by teachers and parents.

Trusts, for the most part, set the same curriculum, teaching methods, lesson structures and terminology across all of their schools. It's incredibly rare for it to be individualised to each school. Class or subject teachers are rarely involved with the creation of this curriculum, with it typically being set by a group at the exec level. Parents may be "consulted" to make them feel part of the process but, often, this is a PR paper exercise rather than one which is meaningful and impactful.

Pretty much any decision around an unknown quantity is you doing algebra.

• the recipe is for 4 eggs but I only have 3, how should I adjust the other quantities?
• DC's present costs £100, how much do I need to save per week to be able to afford it?
• I need to be at my appointment in two hours, the train takes half an hour and there's a walk, what time should I leave?
• my favourite team or athlete is 10 points behind, what do they need to do to win?

It's absolutely ridiculous - they are spending time on a bloody computer doing this crap, when they are still forgetting capital letters, and struggling with handwriting. It made my blood boil and I complained several times. Teachers need to band together and rebel!

Because parents love teacher strikes don't they?

I rebelled in quite a minor way and was bullied out of teaching - the first of several as the school was becoming an Academy. Luckily I was nearly 60 and ready to go.

There was even less freedom in the curriculum under the Academy as schemes of work were set from above and lessons timed to the minute.

England has gone up in the world school stats for English and Maths - that's good enough for me.

And what's worse they STILL teach joined up handwriting - what a total waste of time!!
Couldn't believe it when they told me this last night at parents evening! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

It’s absolutely pointless. I’m an ex English teacher and we never used any of those things. Sure, understanding the basics helps to access the secondary curriculum etc but it’s really only useful for people who go on to study languages. It’s ridiculous teaching it at primary.

We now home educate our daughter and she won’t be forced to learn any of this unless she wants to. She can always come back to it later if needed.

It’s just a great way to suck the joy out of learning about our amazing language.

Some of the terms that are now taught in primary schools were things that I didn’t come across until I was doing my Linguistics degree (and I couldn’t tell you what most of them are now!) Complete waste of time and puts added pressure on teachers and school staff to teach this rather than concentrate on stuff that will actually help children!

My child is still in nursery so I haven’t been through that with him. However, I can see how that is helpful when I am trying to teach my husband a foreign language.

I am a child of the 70s and learnt grammar, but not the weird stuff they teach now! I have worked in publishing so my command of English is pretty high and I have no idea what a fronted adverbial is.
Thankfully my DCs are old enough to have missed this nonsense, but they still got the secondary school Gove-isation rubbish.

I remember asking dd's Year 6 teacher to explain to me what a fronted adverbial was...

As others have said, this was a political decision and not an educational one.

I’m learning Spanish and I think if I had been able to remember ANY grammar (I can just about remember what a verb and a noun is)it would have been helpful.

I suspect that will come as a massive surprise to most parents of children in academies. the reality is that the curriculum is mostly decided by the academy trust's governing body with the headteachers and senior staff, and is mostly tailored to the requirements of national testing.

That's interesting. I used to think like the OP (still do to an extent) but there's no denying that my dc have found a lot of what they learnt useful when it's come to English Language and Literature gcses and, with A level drama, even more so.

If you are going to make a comment about it, at least have the foresight to go and look at the at the NC. Noun and adjective are common knowledge and should be taught. The present perfect, subjunctive form and passive voice are not common knowledge and there is no reason to teach them to 9/10 year olds.

I think I have a slightly different perspective. I went through a school system in a different country where we did learn grammar in quite a bit of detail. And now I am in a field where excellent communication is important but many people aren't hired specifically for their writing skills.

My experience over many years is that the people who are naturally proficient and successful in fields where writing is important are fine. They're generally voracious readers and absorbed the rules more or less by osmosis because they had so much exposure to them.

I find that grammar is more useful with those who have less natural aptitude for it. It's helpful to be able to explain why that particular construction sounds jarring, or why that sentence structure isn't correct and many people will trip up reading it, or why you don't need seventeen commas in every sentence. Because when they know why it doesn't work, they can apply that in the future.

I've seen it with one of my own kids as well - his writing improved out of sight as he learned grammar and felt more confident that he knew what was "right" and was more willing to take risks. It was definitely a lesson for me as I was always an enthusiastic creative writer and unpicking why he found it challenging and overwhelming was fascinating and a real lesson for me. And now he's learning foreign languages properly he's definitely finding it useful.

Overall, with nearly 30 years in the field, I do think the overall standard of grammatical proficiency is declining, and I wonder if it's linked to the rise of social media and a reduction in people's exposure to many different styles of long form text. The latest innovation seems to be "when in doubt, shove in a comma". If a bit of grammar teaching can reverse that trend I'm very much in favour of it!

That said, I do find some of the attitudes on this thread a bit odd - that if everyone doesn't benefit in adulthood from being taught x, y, or z then it's pointless. I may not use physics or chemistry terribly much in my day to day life but I absolutely reap the benefits of the work of those who do!

I used to be a primary school teacher and bloody hated teaching all this. Agree with PPs that knowing BASIC grammar is important (noun, verb, adverb etc).

I used to have a colleague who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of grammar and was also an inspirational teacher. She found the most creative and engaging ways of teaching this stuff, and the kids in her class loved SPAG. The problem is that most teachers didn't cover all this at school (me included) and it's bloody difficult to understand, which leads to very dry teaching. Even then, I'm not sure what use it actually is apart from learning a second language.

I honestly think you'd get better results if you removed all but basic SPAG from the curriculum and replaced it with reading, listening to books read aloud, and listening to audiobooks. Lots of different texts written by authors with different writing styles, so a huge and varied exposure to different grammatically-correct ways of expressing ideas. I would bet my house this would result in better writing and a stronger grasp of grammar- with the added bonus of being enjoyable and exposing children to new ideas/times/places.

I've taught a lot of kids to write. In my experience, it's ALWAYS the children who are avid readers who turn into great writers (and spellers). Being read to/listening to audiobooks also works. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it might be better to leave writing for a couple of years and focus most of the KS1 curriculum on reading and storytelling.

As others have said. Blame the politicians.

I suspect from another point of view that it’s to do with understanding how the English language is made up and why grammar changes and can be so complicated. Then it can be applied. But I agree personally it’s a waste of time. I’m a teacher and it’s the same with some maths. I had a child with additional needs who was able to do the old fashioned column addition and subtraction. Without fail for it right. But I wasn’t allowed to teach it in that year group and technically they shouldn’t have been taught it until later. Instead they have to do alsorts of complicated multistep chunking of bigger numbers so that they understand the values of the hundreds tens and units columns ans why we ‘borrow’ or ‘exchange’ digits etc. but I reality this child couldn’t get to grips with all the other methods and was perfectly secure in the old fashioned method (possibly taught at home as we hadn’t done it at school). At the end of the day people will revert to what they know and can apply.

we were always told you won’t have a calculator when you’re out shopping so mental maths is important. You won’t have a spell check or dictionary to help you out etc!! In reality we have all those things on our phones.

I do believe we need to teach good grammar, know the difference between their, there and they’re and my biggest bug bear - bought/brought which are two totally different root words which people often get wrong as they have totally different meanings. But finger adverbials and go as far as I’m concerned. It may all help with learning foreign languages but come GCSE they aren’t even compulsory these days.

English lit lecturer here and I totally agree. A lot of it was Gove. I have cousins who teach primary age and friends who teach secondary, they all hate it too. Fronted adverbials got me! We don’t ask for any of this shit when you do an actual English degree fwiw so it’s all useless information.

Drives me mad. My Year 4 loves creative writing and (I think) writes really well and has some lovely ideas. Trouble is at school now she is constantly being told that what she writes is wrong, because it doesn't contain the right mix/formula of grammar. I encourage her to read widely and keep writing but it's so disheartening.

I can sort of see this. When I started learning a second language as an adult I had to be taught what the indefinite article was, even though I've been using it unconsciously for years.

I think saying to kids hey you don't need to learn grammar is the limit their opportunities on the world

I don’t think there is a single person on this thread who is saying that. Read what people are actually saying about the primary curriculum.