I found this written in dd's reading diary today ...

[WigWamBam]

"We discussed characters and there personalitys".

Notice

If you had had the opportunity to learn Greek or Latin at school it might have saved you this confusion nappies
I was at secondary in the 70s, the height of the "dispense with all teaching of grammar" trend as far as English was concerned.
It was my Latin teacher who taught us all about subjects, objects, past participles etc
The French I had already been learning for a year (also without a hint of grammar) onlt started to make any real sense then.
I think you have to take this up with the school WWB. Not to belittle the teacher (I too think they do a great job), but how can she teach them basic proper English if she struggles with pronouns and plurals of words beginning with Y?
Might she just have been having a dreadful day? Are the comments usually better spelt?

*ending" with Y! We can all have bad days, proof perfect...

or even ending. I think I might go and get a glass of wine...

We are having similar issues this year with ds' teacher. On occasion, I have corrected it (eg when she corrected his spelling of "leopord" to "lepoard" ) but I don't think she looks back over old stuff, so may not have noticed.

We also noticed at Parents' night that she had three times made a comment in one of his language books with an "it's" when it should have been "its" - my personal bugbear

What I do do is explain to ds why certain things are wrong and what they should be, without explicitly commenting on what the teacher has written.

i think i might sign up for an adult education course... or even a gcse or something. not that i covered grammar during gcse's the first time. ( i dropped french because i felt the grammar stuff was just too alien/difficult)

have you read 'eats shoots and leaves' by lynne truss? i think it's lynne. might be lyn.

anyhoo, i think you'd like it, it's very easy, very readable grammar basics and it's genuinely amusing. not just to pedantic twerps, to RL people.

I get stuff like this in ds's reading record almost every week. It drives me mad and I am on the verge of saying something to his teachers. 'B read this too me very well', 'We talked about storys and index's today' - AAAARGH!

There is a children's version too Aitch - ds, a Pedant Cadet, was given it as a present
Nappies, no wonder we are the language dunces of Europe really - I think it is a very tall order to ask any child to learn a different language when they have no idea how their own "works".
Most older school pupils in France will have Le Bon Usage by Grevisse and Le Nouveau Bescherelle. These two behemoths have not been superseded AFAIK. But if you were to ask most secondary schoolchildren about Gower's Plain Words - barely known. Unsexy cover but a brilliant book.

we had a teacher in primary school who taught us basic grammar when we were eight years old. best lessons i ever had, gave me a love of languages ancient and modern, a love of my own language and, i strongly suspect, a career.

thank god for that woman.

Ditto my Latin teacher Aitch
She managed to teach me English grammar, ancient history, classics and the fundamentals of all European romance languages as well as what was on the book jacket
It only takes one, doesn't it?

it's a great shame that so few people do latin any more, imo. piece of piss to learn the romance languages if you've even done a year of latin. i only ever did two and i know, i just KNOW that i can pick up new languages because of it. not that they're all the same fundamentally, of course they aren't, but there are patterns, there is a logic that by and large is there. with the hon excep of hungarian, of course.

Like others, I learnt my grammar via Latin (also in the 70s). I had done French for a year at secondary school without the benefit of a knowledge of grammar; it became so much easier in 2nd year when I started Latin. It not only helped my French - it also helped my German and also my English.

The fact that my mum was/is also an English teacher who believes in a basic knowledge of grammaer also helped

oh dear pb you must be v old...

47

.... but I am told I don't look it.

The lack of grammar in schools is one of my biggest bug bears. OK, it's not as exciting for some children as writing a story but is the tools around which all languages are built. Without an understanding of it we can't talk about language or indeed hope to understand another.

I was a grammar geek (I admit it) but learned most of my grammar through studying Latin and later German rather than English. In English classes we were only told a verb is a "doing word" etc, and what use is that?

I have taught English in France and observed children as young as seven talking about very complex grammar terms as though they were second nature. THAT is what we need to do in this country, not shy away from it because it is seen as unfashionable or boring.

I have been teaching my DP French and have had to start right back at the beginning, explaining all the parts of speech, how language operates etc. My DP is certainly not stupid, he is a very intelligent lawyer, just a product of our flawed education system.

Rant over.

Phew.

Oh dear! I was taught very little grammar in the early eighties but I DO teach it now.

Tut tut!

I learnt all my English grammar through studying French and German.

I would literally scream at a 10 year old in my class - as in comedy high pitched shriek - for the mistake in your dd's diary. It tends to stick in their mind

It's symptomatic of a decaying society IMHO.

Life was much better when everyone could spell and punctuate correctly.

I had some advertising copy from an independent school the other day, it would cost you £££ to send your kids there. However, thier copy was full of the following:

"our pupil's have achieved excellent SAT's and GCSE results"

"Bording available"

"Contact the burser"

Dreadful. It's amazing how much of this shit I see from people Whom Should Really Know Better.

Send the reading diary back with comments in red biro all over it.

Their copy

I am shit at typing, nit spelkling

Arse, I'm like that MNer of yore who had lost her brian.

I started learning German first (at 11) then Latin at 12, adding French at 14 and it was with German that I first really started to learn about grammar.

(Sometimes I still use German to work out how to structure English sentences - how weird is that? Especially since I'm not v good at German these days.)

My secondary English teacher was pretty old-school, so I learned a lot of the practicalities of grammar there. The real technicalities, though, I only learned at university (English degree). So I figure it's not surprising that primary teachers at least, especially the younger ones, don't have a great grip of grammer. Not that I consider putting apostrophes in the right place to require a 'great' grip of grammar.

DD only starts school in September, so not experienced this yet - her class teacher is pretty young, but on the other hand the headmaster is VERY old-school. He probably corrects the reading diaries in red pen, never mind the parents doing it!

At DS1's pre-school, they have a drawer for "scissor's"