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!

I am mid 50s
I did these at school
English Language O Level
English Literature O Level
French O Level
Latin O Level

Learning grammar was included
We were taught to write in a formal manner

I'm 73 and I only learned declension in learning a foreign language. We learned remarkably little grammar and yet I got a first and an MA in English in the 1970s and have had some of my work published on both sides of the Atlantic, so apparently I learned enough to get by. Go figure.

I'm 62 and I recall this as well. I also had to learn some poems by heart. I was taught in a small village school. We all did exactly what the teacher told us. Our teacher was very strict. There was no bad behaviour and every child learned. I recall learning weights and measures as well as spelling, the order of Kings and Queens and capital cities in this way. Rote learning might not be fun or popular, but it works.

I'm not yet 65, but nearly.

I was taught no grammar at all at school. I picked it up from reading.

@Anniegetyourgun Happy birthday 😁🍾🎂💪

I’m 52 and was the last year to do O’Levels. I was certainly never taught grammar, in any formal way, in English lessons. And I’d forgotten all about ITA! But now you’ve reminded me I remember moving to a brand new housing estate, some time during my primary years, and my mum grilling the headteacher of the brand new primary school because she’d heard they taught ITA. I also remember him saying ‘I can assure you madam, I wouldn’t touch ITA with a barge pole!’ . And like you I’ve been told that I must have been taught grammar. I definitely wasn’t. What were the rules in the 1970s/early 80s? Could individual schools do whatever they liked?

I'm 67 and we learned English, Latin and French grammar throughout our secondary school careers.

We were taught English grammar in primary school too, of course.

I'll be 70 next month and we didn't learn English grammar like that. I went to a grammar school for girls in south-east London.

I also went to school in Cambridgeshire, our school was about as strict as they come sadly!

We were taught grammar - in depth and at great length - at secondary school, but didn't learn verbs by rote in English lessons. We did for French and Spanish, I can still remember the conjugation of many French verbs strangely.

I'm in my late 60s.

In junior school we were taught some English grammar, but only how to identify nouns, verbs, adverbs & adjectives, plus punctuation. You would, however, be corrected on other grammatical mistakes (as well as spelling mistakes) in written work no matter what the subject was.

I went to a grammar school at 11 and we had to conjugate verbs in the different tenses in French & Latin, as well as the declensions of Latin nouns by rote.

I've never heard of some of the things taught in English grammar nowadays!

@Snowflakesonhisnose

I think that shows that before the national curriculum, different schools were indeed very different.

This was my experience too. I went to several different schools in the 50s and 60s as we moved around a lot.

In Latin and French we learned how to decline verbs by rote and the various grammatical rules but never in English.

I'm not quite 65, but I was definitely taught English grammar - parts of speech, tenses etc., clauses, constructing sentences.

It varied from school to school which explains why people had different experiences. There was no National Curriculum then. I went to several different primary schools in different areas, and their methods and standards varied wildly. I remember joining one school and feeling that my classmates were way behind in reading and writing.

I'm in my late sixties and we were taught a lot about English grammar, but not by rote.
Any other languages, we had to conjugate verbs, etc.

There were the two English O levels, English Language and English Literature.

Child of the 50s here, we didn't learn things like verb tenses that way. We did do a fair amount of grammar: I remember learning about what nouns, verbs adverbs etc were and how to analyse a sentence to find the subject, verb and object. I also remember learning about subordinate clauses. However, we never did all the stuff like fronted adverbials etc that children do today. I think my early grammar training is why I struggle so much with reading bad grammar now: when I see something like "I would of ...." I can almost hear my old English teacher shouting "'of' is not a verb!"

We also had lists of spellings to take home and learn every week. I used to read a lot and was lucky enough to find spelling easy, and was also quite disorganised and tended to lose my lists, so ultimately I just stopped taking the lists home and just trusted to luck.

This. I’m 31 so not your target audience but I didn’t learn the verbs at school but my parents (who are your target audience) taught me French and German like this. I think they’d say “conjugate VERB” and then I’d list it all off.

For example conjugate avoir (to have) and I’d list off like this. School never taught me this it was my parents who pushed it.

I'll be 60 this year, went to a girls' grammar school in the far NW of England. We were definitely taught grammar and tenses, especially in first and second form, though I'd say I picked up more grammar from learning French, German and Spanish. I got As in O level English Language and also English Literature <<preens>>

My Dad is nearly 90 and years ago he gave me the English language textbooks he used at grammar school. They are a fascinating read, the teaching was so detailed and by rote. I probably learned even more from those old books from around 1950 than I did at school myself.

Incidentally, my Mum was part of the first cohort to do O levels, she got five, which was impressive at the time. No individual grades then, just pass or fail. She went to the same girls' grammar as me.

The decline in the standard of written English these days shocks me, tbh. I know language evolves, but even so...

Im 66 and the way in which I was taught grammar was very similar to this, and my junior and secondary schools were extremely strict about the correct use of grammar, spelling etc. I found learning Latin in the second and third years of secondary school was extremely helpful in understanding sentence construction. I spent many hours working with my daughter on grammar when she was young - she was really fascinated by it and she has an exceptional command of written English now that she is older.

Not as such in English, but we had Latin classes and learnt it from there. Amo, Amas,Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Amant. We learnt this very early on by chanting as a class. I have found Latin to be useful when doing crosswords and discussing the Roman Empire with DH. I am 70.

We did not learn verbs by rote for English, but did so for other languages.

Grammar was taught in Primary school in the ways described by others - identifying verbs, nouns, adjectives etc. I really enjoyed deconstructing sentences or identifying the errors. We also had nightly spelling lists to learn for our weekly test on Fridays. We were expected to achieve 10/10 of the words chosen randomly from the fifty we'd studied. I recall the nine year old shame of misspelling 'plumb' as 'plum' and having to explain to my parents what had gone wrong!

In Primary 7 we had a male teacher who mispronounced words to assist our spelling. For example he'd say sKissors or veHicle. Obviously effective as I still say this internally whenever I write those words.

Scot educated from 1967-1979 in bog-standard Primary and Secondary schools.

To this day, I still say to myself, “ ee gee why petee” when I'm writing the word Egypt, as a legacy from a similarly minded teacher.

I'm early 60s, & exactly the same. I had no idea about grammatical terms, although my grammar has always been ok, so I must have learned somehow, just not in a formal way.

And I always remember being told that Bird's Eggs Are Ugly when writing beautiful.

This is true. If our teacher ( ancient spinster) was in a bad mood it would be maths all day. Roman Catholic primary in 1960's.

Only learnt stuff like this in foreign languages (I'm not quite 60 though)