Grammar

[gezzazz]

As some of you may know grammar is now part of the school curriculum.
I thought I'd post my daughters (year 6)marked grammar homework. Hopefully the image will be readable or I'll have to post a number of small images. I wont mention the school or say anything further.

Austin runs fast. X ????

Both sentences are correct.

Fast is both an adverb and an adjective, similar to hard:

She thought hard.

Phone Helen is a complete sentence - imperative.

The trouble are teachers who haven't learnt this level if grammar themselves and just see somewhere "adverbs end in -ly"

*of grammar

Dorothy, you shall get full marks. (imperative)

The worry is that adjectives and adverbs are not particularly difficult concept.
Moving on to prepositions, conjunctions, subordinate clauses and imperatives I've had to read up on this myself.

I was going to put this one down to a bad hair day.
If it happens again I'll discuss the marking with teacher?

Yes I would

I'm still trying to work out what else the teacher was looking for in the Phone Helen sentence?

I think the teacher doesn't actually know what she is teaching. I would discuss it with the teacher because being told that "fast" is not an adverb is pretty bad! The others I could probably let slide...once.

I would approach the teacher now, and say, nicely, , that you are confused as to why "fast" has been marked as incorrect, and as to why the imperative sentence needs more.

Not to catch out the teacher, but because it's simply not fair on a child who has done it right!

To be petty it should say begins with a verb etc not begin

This is really basic stuff the teacher is getting wrong. I'm not s teacher or particularly great at grammar even.

I wouldn't be able to let this lie. It's not fair on your dd who is being taught wrong. This time you were able to see it and explain to her she was right but the teacher will be teaching it wrong in the class and you won't be there to interject

I'm also curious to what sort of sentence they are expecting to "begin with an emotion". I mean, I can think of plenty of sentences that do, but how is that grammar?! (Or is it meant to be a lesson on abstract nouns, perhaps, and they think that's too abstract a concept?). I find that a lot of the stuff in the grammar test is actually something else, like vocabulary.

Good point about the "emotion" question!

Would it be something like 'Happy now, Clare walked home from Dan's.'?

I would pull them up asap, politely of course.

This was the third issue. probably not as bad as the first two. Regarding teachers comment - How were we supposed to know that. Of course may have been mentioned in lesson?

Starts with an emotion would be :

Surprised,......
Shocked,......
Horrified, ......
Disgruntled,.....

Regarding the marking of the last question I had thought it was confused with the requirement for this question.

On a side note, there must be a problem in teachers basic Maths and English asnow before applying for teacher training English (grammar and spelling) and Maths tests must be taken and passed, in addition to any other qualifications. The rules were recently changed, fail twice and you are not allowed to reapply for two years.
Worryingly the teacher in question is probably one of the better teachers at my daughters school.
Above said there are clearly some good teachers out there. I recently enrolled for a School Experience (for people considering teacher training). I was most impressed by the school and the teachers on the day. I'd consider that school an good place to send my children - if it were not 20 miles away and I was not priced out of the property market in the area.