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?

Tweet Gove and tell him what a useless twonk he is!!

This tea towel says it all (the bottom bit)......

https://www.theliterarygiftcompany.com/products/the-fronted-adverbial-explainer-teatowel?_pos=11&_sid=31ef5f03a&_ss=r

Funny enough,I was a French teacher in Scotland. Pupils not understanding grammar made my life so much harder.

Welcome to the curriculum the Tories brought in.

I'm.pretty sure no great writer ever worried too much about learning different word types etc. Yes they are useful but not at such depth.

I'm a primary school teacher.

Thanks for your reply @ColleenDonaghy 😊

As someone who has learned a couple of foreign languages to an advanced level, grammar is very useful for that.

but agree frontal adverbials and the like are a waste of time- my DC got all this too.

pointless- but will come in useful when correcting people’s grammar on mumsnet in the future! 🤦‍♀️

Sorry - I replied earlier in the thread but just pressed reply rather than quote so it didn't tag you 😂. Just in case you thought I'd ignored your question.

The terms aren't seen as clunky when they are the first and only terms taught. They are just the correct term for the thing the child is being exposed to. Learning that it's a split digraph is no more difficult than learning it's a magic e special rule: both involve the memorisation of new vocabulary. However, one is the correct term and would never need to be unlearned. The other is a shortcut that becomes wrong in the future.

We don't say that children should avoid learning a second language because the vocabulary can be unusual and difficult: why do we underestimate the capabilities of children in other areas of the curriculum?

We cannot understand why we are still stressing children out with things like ‘identify the relative pronoun’, what use is this information?

Why on earth do people insist on regarding any grammatical terminology as 'stressful'? It's no more stressful than maths, science or geography terminology. Certainly, it's debatable how much of it they need to know in primary school, but there's nothing actually wrong with learning the names for different kinds of words.

Parents tend to be scared by it because they (unfortunately) didn't learn it at school. After 28 years of being an MFL teacher, it's frankly a relief to finally teach Year 7s who know a bit more than a vague idea of what a noun and an adjective are. Children in other countries learn about how their own language works - why shouldn't ours? I don't see why it's prefictably any less useful in life than lots of other things they learn!

Shinyandnew I taught adverbs of time, manner and place. Never called them 'fronted' as that wasn't a term used in Scottish education as far as I'm aware. But adverbs were part of the primary curriculum. I see nothing wrong with primary schools teaching adverbs

It's not about knowing the difference between a noun and an adjective. It's about archane grammatical definitions no adult will ever need to be aware of. Pre Gove the English language GCE syllabus was about competent use of language and understanding. He wrecked that and now primary school children are being taught this pointless information. I have a PhD and had to look some of this stuff up when I was tutoring. Thank goodness I don't have to teach it in school.

I'm a TA. Last week I took out a group of three 8 year olds, who can barely read, to teach them about fronted adverbial phrases. A complete waste of my time and the poor children. The primary English curriculum is absolutely stultifying. It's shameful.

I was a primary school teacher for 10 years and have a special interest in grammar.

Without a solid understanding of the structure of our own language, accessing foreign languages becomes very difficult.

For children with a more mathematical brain, knowing and applying the rules of grammar and sentence composition can be a safe and reassuring route into writing.

For the majority of children, learning correct grammatical rules and technical terminology is not hard; from 4 year olds learning about digraphs in phonics, to 10 year olds learning about the subjunctive mood, most of them do get it.

Yes, for some children, learning about using a "subordinate clause" in Year 2 is going to be a challenge, but surely no one would advocate for an education system where the only content taught is pitched at the level of the least able learner? That is what differentiation is for.

I'm guessing that you've never learned another language - it proved to be extremely useful to understand the building blocks of a language.

Indeed.

It's disheartening how many teachers fervidly believe that teaching British children to write "Once upon a time COMMA" is both desperately difficult and useless.

I now spend far too many work hours trying to decipher gibberish from native English speakers who cannot write a single coherent paragraph. Punctuation may as well never have been invented. And it's not the subbies, it's the office managers with university degrees who are the least literate.

On the other hand, I read one works summary yesterday that was like a breath of fresh air. It was written by a recently-arrived Ukrainian contractor who had taken utmost pains to write as clearly as possible. Thanks, Myroslav.

A lot of problems with the primary curriculum now came in when the politicians took it over from the 1980s on. When I was training to be a teacher in the 1970s we were all incredulous that in France and elsewhere all schools had to follow the same government prescribed curriculum. Advisory organisations like the Schools Council which was run by education experts and teachers were disbanded and in came the politicians who of course all knew better - and like Gove had ‘had enough of experts’.
I went to a state Grammar School in the 1960s, have an A level in English and have no idea what any of those grammatical terms mean apart from verb, adjective and noun.

So many things taught at school are outdated and irrelevant to everyday life.

I have a degree in English, was an English lit/lang lecturer and have taught for over 9 years in primary and secondary.
The entire system needs a shake up. It’s more important to the Government that we have generations of children who know how to write an adjectival clause with a subjunctive in the persuasive manner, than it is to understand how to write a business email. It is apparently “poor practise” for me to focus and entire lesson on the correct way to address a formal business letter, than it is to demonstrate noun phrases. Which are, in my local area at least, in common useage.
The thing that gets me most is that most of these children won’t know how to apply for a mortgage or budget their money or write a shopping list, but they will be able to identify outdated 1950s concepts.
Todays primary education has no place in modern society.

But not everything taught at school is taught with the intention of being applied to everyday life. Some is the building blocks for higher study.

So, algebra we all use daily as outlined above. Calculus less so, but it's important to teach it so that some can go on to become mathematicians, engineers, scientists etc. We need to give all children an introduction so they can choose what's right for them.

Equally, some things are taught so that you learn to think in particular ways. A lot of Maths is designed to encourage systematic thinking and problem-solving skills. Those are essential whether the actual application of trig ends up being used or not.

Absolutely.

I have a very mathsy brain and found that really helped with learning grammar when I learned French and German at school, as someone said above.

Contact the Government. Nothing to do with schools and all to do with them and their statutory curriculum and y6 grammar SATs test!

@ToffeePennie agree. If only schools could teach mortgages etc!
Luckily in primary, the focus for writing for us is around audience and purpose. We definitely do need to teach all the grammar, but it should be done through creating an effective piece of writing and that should be the main aim.

@Deathwillbebutapause we find adults who can’t because during the 80s, 90s and early 00s there was barely any focus at all on grammar. I was taught noun/adjective etc in A-Level language, but hardly anything beyond that in the mid to late 90s. Now, this is taught to 6 and 7 year olds.

Since 2016, it was written into the curriculum and so children leaving primary should (and mostly can) do all that you describe and more.

Depends how writing is taught. The focus should still be on audience and purpose, not writing by numbers grammar focus. Luckily, not all teachers/schools allow this to happen.

Moving abroad to the continent, where there was more interest / focus on language, and the details of grammar was a big feature, although I think it was maybe more at a slightly older age / early secondary school. But then formal learning (including reading/writing/maths) also started like 2 years later than UK. We did 5 foreign languages as standard, and knowing this stuff really helps.