Question for the over 65s!

[lightlights]

Not an AIBU exactly, but I have been having this discussion with someone. When you were at school, did you learn all verbs, all tenses, by rote, for example:
I am
You are
He/she is
We are
You are
They are

Schools stopped teaching grammar in the 70s apparently and some grammar teaching re-started sometime in the 90s, but before the 70s formal and strict grammar was taught, is that right?
Thank you!

(Well) over 65. I am pretty sure we learned what verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and comparatives were at primary school. We started with them being described as naming words, doing words etc. We had to start learning latin and french at the next school (grammar school in my case) and definitely already knew what the parts of a sentence were called then. We had to "parse" sentences (pick out what sort of words were verb, noun, pronoun, adverb, etc). We did not learn English grammar by rote. Foreign verbs were taught by rote. In the second school we were also taught to precis passages, (cut out unnecessary phrases, simplify content), which has been very useful to me when writing business letters, texts in life and also being able to summarise points in a clear way. I didn't learn what the subjunctive was until doing French O-level.

I left my secondary modern school school at 15 in ‘65 and never had a grammar lesson. The teachers in my primary school weren’t trained for the job. We were 41 in a class. It shouldn’t have been allowed to let pupils to be so undereducated.

We also worked through a text book called First Aid in English. I loved it.
We were not taught by rote, but through our grammar lessons and in writing and speaking.

Not the age group you're looking for but I always wondered why we did that in French and German but not in English lessons.

I'm early 60s and wasn't taught this in English, only foreign language lessons.

I'm 55 but don't remember many grammar rules other than noun, verb, adverb, adjective etc. I did Latin, French, German, Russian though and did learn a lot through that - nominative, dative etc and the different cases. Dd was taught English as foreign language and they did cover lots of rules that I wasn't even aware of. I find it all quite fascinating.

I'm roughly that age and like most people posting did very little formal grammar in English- parts of speech, simple punctuation (confess to still being vague over colons and semi colons). If you'd asked me to conjugate a verb aged 10 I would have had no idea what you meant. However we all read very widely and a variety of material. So decent formal English came naturally.
All the stuff about tenses, the subjunctive and so on I learnt to name through learning French and German.
A slight tangent, but its wierd that while teaching English seems to have become bizarrely formal and rule obsessed (thank you M Gove) foreign language teaching seems to have gone the other way. Its been a few years since they left school but my DCs seemed to learn foreign languages by parroting stock phrases rather than learning how the language actually worked.

Same (68). We were taught about things like subordinate clauses, word order, conditionals, and some more things I only remember when I read one of those threads expressing horror at children's grammar lessons!

I went to school in the Black Country, and staff were very firm on correcting the use of "am" for every person - I don't remember reciting conjugations, but we might have.

Yes. Grammar was taught like this. I did A-level English, French, and Latin, and we damn well had to learn conjugations and declensions. I still remember most of it, and I've added Spanish and German as well. Good stuff.

ah yes, precis ! very useful

I'm 64 but that's how we were taught too. There was a lot of emphasis on learning through practice. The other important factor is tht there was no national curriculum so there were more opportunities for teachers to choose what they taught.

I don't remember learning to conjugate verbs specifically but I do remember learning grammar as we had English lessons up to 'O' Level. I still recall that there are 9 adverbial phrases though I can only remember 4 (time, place, reason, purpose).

yes, very sure this was in Primary School.
Glasgow, Scotland mid 60's-early 70's

Just wanted to say thank you so much for all the replies, I am loving reading all these different stories! I think I got the decade wrong, sounds like formal grammar was stoppped in the 60s not 70s. But only in England, it seems, or at least not Scotland where formal lessons continued, which is really interesting.

im 67 had a grammar school education we learnt the above by rote in french and latin but not in english we were taught punctuation and grammar but presume as we had all passed our 11 plus it was presumed we knew the correct terms to use

I'm 70. We were taught grammar by learning nouns, verbs, adjectives etc then using them in writing or comprehension questions. Also answering questions - underline the verbs in this sentence. Fill in the missing... subject and object of the sentence, underline the subordinate clause etc

Grammar was drilled into us like that, by reading (lots) and by it being corrected in every subject.
You might have written a perfect conclusion in your Chemistry book but if your grammar was wrong that was corrected. It was as important as the content

We never used terms like 'digraph' and I wouldn't know a fronted adverbial if I tripped over it

Going by what I read online and the work of a lot of journalists, we could do with going back to those days.

^^This

no i left school in 1972 and grammar was a part of our english language o level and it was still a grammar till the 1990s its now not it is part of the local college

No. I was at school from 1959 to 1971

We were taught very formally. Grammar was VERY important

I agree with you!

Ditto me.

I am 63

When I was teaching English in the 90s, my top set English GCSE b̶e̶g̶g̶e̶d̶ asked me if I could help them with learning grammar - they were really embarrassed about not knowing any in their Spanish lessons. I offered lunchtime sessions and kept the Head of Spanish in the loop...

On Look North last night in huge font was the word 'leagal' I nearly choked on my tea.

I don't remember this but I do remember doing grammar and being taught about eg subordinate clauses etc but that was at High School. There were specific lessons classed as Grammar. That was between 1967 and 1973. I do recall conjugating French and Latin verbs. Scottish.

I'm 68. We were never taught them by rote (though we were in French) but we had English grammar workbooks that definitely included exercises that checked that we were using them correctly.

And yes, though I went to a grammar school, we were never taught terms other than nouns, verbs and adjectives. So the whole frontal adverbials ridiculousness has me rolling my eyes.