So DD's clearly getting a far better education that I did and its starting to show

[listsandbudgets]

DD was asking me questions while doing her homework tonight and not only did I not know the answers I didn't even understand the question. She was asking me if certain words were adverbs. I don't know what an adverb is. Not the first time she's asked me things like this and I've had to quietly google the answer before I respond.

dd is in year 4 at a good school. My schools were not good. I only found out well after I left that the year I did GCSEs only 27% managed 5 grade A-Cs. I was sitting next to people in class who could barely read at 16 and were really disruptive. I somehow did well at GCSE followed by A Levels and a Russell Group university but despite all that I feel my basics are so lacking. I'm worried as dd learns more the gaps will become more and more obvious.

Does anyone else feel like this?

I have come to the conclusion that I must have been taught this stuff at some point but it is gone now. Much like several holidays I took when I was younger, and various family events that everyone else remembers but I don't! It's such basic stuff but clearly my brain didn't bother to retain it.

I don't quietly Google though, DS knows I don't know/remember everything and I don't think it's a bad thing that he knows that even adults find some things hard to recall. He actually quite enjoys 'teaching' me and Googling with me, and especially enjoys getting his mental maths right when I'm wrong!

Don't be ashamed, turn it to your advantage and learn it again together.

I did the majority of my education in the 1980's (started in 1979 and did GCSEs in 1990). We were of the generation where 'chalk and talk' lessons were replaced by book schemes and you didn't learn any grammar terms at all. I was doing A Level English when I heard the word onomatopoeia. This is taught in the infants now I did English at uni and we had a grammar module. All the English students were clueless at diagramming sentences but the foreign students were excellent at it. Don't feel bad, you just weren't taught these things. I went into teaching and basically taught myself everything

i forget grammar terms all the time (I am more a maths person...)

What I have done is get a simple kids grammar book and when ds asks me 'is this an adverb?' I ask him what an adverb is, if he doesn't really know we get the book and we look it up together.

I dress it up as 'i can't tell you the answer, you have to find out for yourself'.

Well, I had an excellent education, and DD1 (now y11) certainly is doing stuff that I didn't. Not so much English grammar, as I had quite a good grounding in that, but other stuff.

Primary

• more emphasis in devising your own experiments in science even at primary (not completely sure I agree with that though)
• some different history topics e.g. DD2 has learned about the ancient Egyptians
• some maths methods are different (sometimes better, sometimes not imo)

Secondary

• ICT wasn't even invented until I did A levels!
• Science topics now include Nuclear fusion etc, plus everyone does some of all 3 sciences for GCSE, where as I didn't do biology
• DD1 learning Spanish
• History analysis of sources and thinking about bias, not just facts facts facts

Learn the basics with your DD whilst she is in Primary, and try to keep up as much as you can with the maths. But take delight she is learning new interesting stuff and let her tell you about it.

I'm enjoying learning about Medicine Through Time and the History of the American West. I could almost do a GCSE in it myself!

You are my generation. We weren't taught grammar, it was unfashionable. Don't feel bad, just explain that to your DD and learn it with her.

I am glad to hear it might not just be that I have forgotten huge chunks of my education!!

Yes me too, especially with maths. DD is doing stuff in year 5 that I vaguely remember from O level years at the 'school of hard knocks'. I just admit I can't remember and we look it up together. DH helps decipher maths and my strength is literacy and spelling so between the 3 of us we manage.

yes i struggle too... im clever...but not whenit comes to describing english terms. whats more i have tried to learn as an adult and it just doesnt stick!

i too use the..it has to be your work, but i will help you find out!

thinking back though... when we used to ask my dad how to spell something, he always used to say...look it up in the dictionary. to which we would howl.... but how can we look it up if we cannot already spell it?

it worked though, i learned loads of words that i wouldnt have come across in everyday speach.

You have inadvertently sent me off on a Google for old reading schemes/maths books of my youth!! I am horrified to find that the 1980s are now a history lesson

I like the ideas from other posters about learning together!

Teenandtween I did the medicine through time and American west for GCSE in 1999 and still remember bits!

There was a whole rhyme I learnt to remember elements for the American exams (1 bun = hot cross bun = religion, 2 shoe = boots = military and war etc)

Kinda happy and sad to hear kids are still learning the same 15 years later lol

Ah lists please do not worry. I've been in teaching for nearly 20 years and was a product of 80's London "trendy" teaching. Therefore my creative writing at school was fab, grammar was poor. Mostly self taught through learning French.

So yes, your dd is being taught different things. There is a major push on Grammar at the moment and the children are being taught the specific vocabulary from a young age. You do know what an adverb is but it's just not part of your everyday experience to use the term. I bet you describe your dd's actions all the time...

There are a good few books out to help parents because so many between the ages of 25-45 missed a lot of this grammar stuff. Have a look on Amazon.

I've always thought I know a reasonable amount but today my Y1 dd had to explain to me what tesselate means

DD1 is also learning about the Good Friday Agreement in history.
No way is that history! It only happened about last week!!

DS (19) was revising for a chemistry exam last night at the kitchen table. DH and I, both 47, were watching.
Something came up about some kind of quantum leap atomic mass thingy and we were all a little puzzled. We called out for our secret weapon.
So DD (12) appeared from her bedroom and explained it all to us.
I learnt more in that half hour than I ever managed to learn at school.

The lack of grammar taught when I was at school used to drive me mad at the time because they still taught it I n my French, German & Latin class. I had no idea what they were talking about as I hadn't learnt the English equivalent. Still pisses me off now in fact. I'd better start swotting up before DD starts school next year.

I'm old - I had grammar hammered into me when I was at primary school (mid 70s, in Holland). It has served me well.

However, I envy the education my DDs are getting - they are learning independent research so much younger, many of the teaching methods used in maths are vastly superior to the way I learned it (though not all) and the way they are taught creative writing in tandem with structuring said writing is great.

I do still know more than they do and am finding GCSE Chemistry a piece of cake though.

pointyfangs I too am old -started school in 1973, O Levels in 1984!! However, being at an English school in England there was obviously no need to teach us English. we did verbs, nouns and adjective. The rest of my grammar I learnt through French and German at secondary although I couldn't really relate it to English even then. I still managed an A in my O Level English though.
As others have said I am now learning it all with my DCs - I think the SPaG test in KS2 SATS has a lot to answer for

Google is your friend :) I have basically had to relearn/learn GCSE maths (I did math o level but teaching very patchy and scraped a B) to help my y5 child and have had to learn to read music from scratch to keep up with their music practice. I am in a professional job and educated to masters level but some of it has been a revelation. Especially the maths which I now realise I didn't understand properly until I had to explain it to someone else. I think its great :) (as long as they aren't being pushed too hard, too early - I do think some of the y5 material is stuff I didn't do until senior school?)

On balance though I think its great that having kids, despite the drudgery side, has actually been educational :)

Seeline, I am the same year as you and have the same knowledge of English grammar - verbs, nouns and adjectives, although we did do adverbs too i seem to recall. I am afraid I have no earthly clue what "tesselate" means and will now have to go off to Google that.

My job now requires a lot of writing and when I write articles for external journals, I learn a bit more about sentrence structure and how to phrase things every time, as the editors make changes to my drafts - very helpful, although I still don't know the grammatical terms for any of it.

We did Latin at school for a while though so, whilst old age has robbed me of much of what I learnt there, I did at one time know very advanced things like the "present subjunctive" (I may have made that one up).

I know things like adverbs (they describe a verb) adjectives (describe an noun) and things like alliteration/assonance/onomatopoeia (all of which are probably spelt wrong, but I can't be bothered to look up and check!). But I'm sure they use things that we didn't. Add a "drop in clause"... I suggested I could drop it on the floor but apparently that wasn't good enough. Google is your friend for terms like that!

However the maths I am very envious of what mine do. I'm a mathematician and I don't think at primary we did anything other than standard sums, fractions and measuring. We might have done symmetry in art, I think.
Now my dcat primary are doing algebra, percentages, ratio, graphs, areas... Now for me, the worst I ever have is disagreeing heavily with the method (chunking and grid method were definitely invented by a non mathematician!). But I can also understand how if you're not mathematical this could look totally incomprehensible.

ICT has obviously changed out of recognition too. I remember the excitement of getting the school's first computer on a trolley that was taken round to the classrooms. And any child considered the teeniest bit naughty wasn't allowed near it! Try explaing that one to Ofsted!

Definitely fashions in education at play here. DH learned, as far as I can see, no formal grammar at all in any language. I went to "old fashioned" (at the time) schools which never stopped teaching these things, so can keep up with the DC (except for DS's Latin and Greek. I did get taught Latin, but to no good effect, and he is way past me already, and I don't even know the alphabet in Greek!)

OP - get yourself some books and enjoy learned alongside DD, and blame the education doctrines of the time!

Frozen - tesselation is fun. Happy Googling!

DeWee - chunking and the grid method should definitely be last resorts for the mathematically challenged, IMHO. I had to get a textbook for teachers to understand them, but then quickly came to an agreement with DS's teachers that since he is entirely at home with numbers there was no point in making him use over complicated methods for the sake of it. Unfortunately they are too often used, irrespective of how mathematically able the DC are, because the teachers are the ones who need them .

I have just looked up chunking on Mumsnet . Is the idea that you can teach division at a much earlier age because long division is too complicated? It just seems a very inefficient way of doing division to me. In fact, long division seems to me to arrive at the answer quicker and more simply but maybe that is becasue I am old and used to it.

Frozen - I know how you feel about chunking but our school told us that this was the method used to help them understand the place values better and the concepts of how numbers were made. So it's not just to get to the answer of the problem! Long division much easier IMHO!

Agree re chunking. It really confused ds because he was already doing that step in his head. Once he realised it turned him off the maths because it was boring. Luckily his teacher is on the ball and have him another method which he finds much easier.

The lesson to me of all these teaching fads is that there is no one size fits all and a good teacher is able to use the different tools at their disposal for different kids. I had a terrible maths teacher when I was 10 and she was very much of the opinion that once she ha explained it that was it and if you didn't get it then maths wasn't for you. The next year I had a wonderful teacher who really unlocked my potential and turned me from a d student to an a student in a term.

Interesting about the grammar teaching (or lack of) in te eighties. Explains a lot - and I too used to find it confusing in French!!