Spelling/grammar mistakes on schools' leaflets: a biggie or not?

[ItalianPoster]

I’d need some perspective here, please. We are visiting local primary schools and have noticed many schools have spelling or grammar mistakes on their websites and in their leaflets. The most common I have come across are writing “it’s” instead of “its” and “you’re” instead of “your”. To my foreign eyes, these mistakes are atrocious. However, I’d like some perspective from native speakers: are these mistakes as horrible as I find them? Are they considered not a big deal? Why/how / to what extent/ etc. This is not a rant - I am genuinely interested in the perspective of native speakers.

The reason I am asking, and the reason I am worried, is because I am concerned it may be a sign that teachers lack the most basic skills they are supposed to teach our children; primary school teachers don’t need to be Nobel prize physicists, but if a teacher said that 2+2 = 5 or struggled to multiply or divide by 10, then I’d be worried how he/she could possibly teach basic maths to children. My concern with its vs it’s is the same. Of course AFAIK a secretary, and not teachers, may have written those things, but, still…

I understand that, when typing quickly, you could skip one letter, type one letter twice, mix the order of two letters, etc. However, I do not understand how you can possibly even think of using an apostrophe when one is not needed; keyboard layouts may change, but on no keyboard is the apostrophe so close to the other letters that typing it might be a typing error – I think you’d have to deliberately look for it. This suggests the people who wrote that stuff are not familiar with the difference between a verb (it’s / you’re) and a possessive pronoun or adjective (its / your). I understand grammar is constantly evolving, I understand there may be different opinions on some of the more arcane rules, but this seems pretty black or white to me.

Thoughts? Thanks!

@LeeMiller you describe the sensation far better than I do but that's exactly what's happening. I NEVER hear words while writing and I never have, so clearly our brains work completely differently while writing. There are probably different ways of doing it for other people too and I feel a better understanding of this concept could be really helpful when it comes to teaching children. We already know children learn differently in so many other ways and I think a lot of children could benefit from a change in the way they are taught, certainly with grammar.

I'm British but bi-lingual, actually tri-lingual now, but I live abroad in a country where lots of Brits make half-hearted and pretty poor attempts to learn the language, and grammar is the main stumbling block. Memorising only gets you so far in language learning and the point comes where at least a basic understanding of grammar concepts is necessary before you can advance any further. British rarely get past this point, not so much due to not understanding the grammar but they actually seem to tense up in fear when the very word 'grammar' is mentioned. There is a mental block there that stops them once grammar becomes an issue, a metaphorical brick wall they won't even consider trying to knock down.

In one of my mother's language courses there were two teachers, one focusing on conversational skills and the other on grammar. All the British students drop out of the grammar courses but the Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians are quite happy with them. I was asking my mother about the content of these classes and she said her brain just switched off when the teacher kept talking about past participles, subjunctives etc. I couldn't really understand why and we talked in circles for a while until it became clear that my mother couldn't understand the idea of perfect tenses and past participles because she had never heard of a past participle and she didn't know what it was. The teacher was probably explaining the concept perfectly but my 74 year old mother - and the other British students were the same, as they all discussed later over coffee - was never going to grasp it because her fear of grammar (and of looking stupid, presumably) stopped her from asking him to explain what a past participle is. She still doesn't know. I've offered to explain but she is quite simply afraid of the whole idea and switches off before you even start.

This grammar teacher is probably excellent but clearly has not realised that his class of British retirees is never going to learn anything in his lessons due to poor teaching in Britain going back decades. I'm sure he'd be gobsmacked to realise none of these people know what a past participle is (he's not English, btw).

And @ItalianPoster, you're absolutely correct in what you say about the descriptions of how apostrophes and such things are used in teaching English in that book. When British people do tell me that they never have and never will understand grammar, I try and look at what they are good at. I explained to my male cousin, 30 years old, that it's like a car. Grammar has a certain amount of component parts which need each other to function - so for an engine you need fuel, air, a spark, for example, and in grammar you have verbs, nouns, adjectives etc. and they all work together in the same way. Similarly to my aunt I explained that it's like making a cake. You need fat, sugar, a raising agent etc. and a sentence is constructed in the same way. Anyone who has heard my explanations given in this way said they'd never heard it put that way before and it makes perfect sense, and made them a bit more relaxed about the idea. However, being realistic, I know that by adulthood it is far too late for these people to change their pre-conceived ideas about grammar.

Oh God, sorry, that's a massive essay and I really don't want to proofread! Hope it's not too bad!

Actually older people may well have been taught grammar. I think they hated it though and that’s why they switch off! (Like me!) The Brits are lazy about language and are happy to take short cuts but there is a big problem with “you are” and “you’re” as you see this mistake all the time and also “to” and “too” are mixed up. I guess some people are poor learners!

School formal material should be accurate. It should be proof read. It wouldn’t sit well with me. However I’m always surprised at the number of people who use incorrect words in conversation. I hear it from sports people and quite a few people when interviewed on the radio. I think it’s lack of education I’m afraid. Definitely lack of reading anything decent.

I went to a secondary school meeting where the head went on and on and on about how he demanded excellence from everyone in school.

Apparently the grammar in his PowerPoint presentation hadn't heard this demand.

SharpLily I fear we have gone totally off topic but I find it fascinating. I wonder if you being bilingual (lucky you!) is linked to our different processing styles? Either way, it's important to remember as teachers and parents that people have different learning and processing styles.

I agree that learning a second language is much, much harder without a decent grammatical base. My experience of foreign language classes in the UK is that until you reach a decent level the focus tends to be thematic or on fixed phrases for specific contexts, rather than approaching a language as a series of building blocks (or components/ingredients, as you put it) that can be rearranged in new combinations to give you a far wider range of options. That's an understandable approach when people lack basic grammatical understanding, but it's also quite limiting.

ItalianPoster that material is rather depressing. But, as it's for older children (who might not have studied grammar from the start of school), I'm not sure if it would reflect what kids starting school now will study. I think Michael Gove led the grammar teaching crusade so the changes are only in the last 5 years or so. I saw a list somewhere of what they're supposed to cover in KS1 & 2 and it looked pretty comprehensive and traditional - close to what my parents studied in the 50s and 60s. But, I've also read a fair bit of criticism - that the approach is too focused on labelling and identifying rather than on understanding and using. Also, increased emphasis on traditional grammar is tough when teachers' own grammatical knowledge is lacking - which is the case for many of my generation at least. Plus, grammar can be incredibly dry! How do you avoid people just switching off, as BubblesBuddy says? I've certainly heard my parents make the same complaint about the way they were taught English grammar (and Latin too) at school so the 'back to the fifties' approach seems flawed.

When I went to school in the 80's we weren't taught grammar. There are many people in the UK in my position. It's not important to many people.

As someone has already suggested, it's usually school business managers, secretaries and admin assistants who are responsible for writing things like newsletters and leaflets. They are usually responsible for uploading information on to school websites too. I have often spotted errors on things before handing them out to my class and have held them back and had the error corrected.

I'm a teacher and a pedant and I think it's appalling.
That said, it's highly unlikely that it was written by a teacher, but a member of the office team. It still should have been checked by someone higher up, however.

Whe we had a similar issue (dc was given a science homework sheet full of errors) I photocopied it and sent it to the head of the English department, asking them to mark it and return it to the science teacher