Teacher with poor grammar

[Cortina]

My son's year 2 teacher has very poor grammar.

Am I being too precious and stuck up about it? Does it matter? I am not comfortable about it.

She says things like 'they is in their bags' 'they was going out' etc. It's actually very, very poor to the point that all the parents have noticed.

My son is copying her and I am concerned. If I am honest I worry about how educated she is etc. She is new to the school this year. Her written grammar is also poor from what I have seen so far.

I want to add she's very nice, friendly, warm and approachable in every other area. WWYD?

Thanks so much for replies.

Another pet hate of mine is 'haitch' for H but will overlook that one

good post lisianthus.

ds (9) came home with spellings for homework yesterday - for the first he'd written "umberella"

When he saw my raised eyebrows he said "we were told to copy down the words very carefully and that's what it said, I thought it looked a bit wrong!"

at which point, words failed me

(had to post, I can spell umberella honest, it's just what my dd called it when she first learned to talk )

agh, missing comma again!

I don't like 'haitch' either - it has a perfectly respectable regional pedigree, but I suspect that some teachers adopt it deliberately because they think it's easier for young children to grasp, and then I start to worry about 'fef' and 'wubbleyoo' .

Nice article here.

To Pyrocanthus, great article thanks!

The comments are very interesting to read through:

OhNoNotAgain - I'm afraid you must have missed how the world's changed. Most of my children's schoolteachers make the most basic mistakes in spoken and written English. Letters home are littered with grocer's apostrophes and that incredibly irritating habit of the pompous and uneducated, the unnecessary quotation mark (We will be having a "school concert" in the "school hall" on Tuesday). What's worse is that the questions which are set, in homework and exams, are frequently so garbled as to be incomprehensible.

What's a grocer's apostrophe?

Orange's.

Probably very unfair on grocer's, but they do tend to have a lot of notice's bearing plural's outside their shop's.

I like the description .

I study family history and very often people get in touch with me to show beautifully (grammatically correct) letters in cursive writing (written 100 plus years ago).

There are no spelling mistakes and they demonstrate the writer's broad vocabulary.

They tell me that the letters have been written by a relative who worked down the pit etc and left school at 13. Surely there must be a mistake and he had in fact gone on to University etc?

The average Tommy in the First World War wrote letters home as I've just described.

I think they say standards were so much higher as that is all that was studied back then?

I am also disappointed my children are not being taught cursive writing but then again I am horribly old fashioned and out of touch.

I've been thinking a bit about that lately cortina. I was going to start a thread on it but didn't get round to it. I have fairly often come across statements claiming that school-leavers nowadays are no longer able to read and write and do basic sums in their head to the standard of 30 years ago. Why such a big drop in standards (if it is indeed so)?

Is it because our curriculum includes too many additional subjects, so we lack the true depth and grounding people used to have in the basics? Is it to do with the level of education the teachers have? I don't really understand it.

I have also read that school-leavers of my own generation lag far behind those of the 1930s in those skills too. I believe that because I think personally my dp were educated to a higher standard than we were.

Talking to teacher friends it's because we are too broad. If we went back to the 30s we'd be tutored in the 3Rs until we left school at 14 or so. Only if we went further with our education would things we studied expand.

Even more recently standards expected in the basic subjects appeared to be much higher. In my Dad's 1956 O'level English paper the questions are incredibly difficult, I still have the paper. Many under graduates would struggle. One of the easier questions I remember is to put the word loquacious in a sentence to illustrate its meaning. I had no idea at 15 or 16 what a word like this meant.

I don't know about the multi-subject thing. I was educated abroad, at a fairly bog standard comp, where we did a round dozen subjects in Sixth Form, and I still have to help my dh (educated at well-known selective private English school) with his English spelling (his native language, not mine). We were simply not allowed to get away with spelling mistakes, in our own language or any other; no-one seems to have told dh he couldn't. And many of his colleagues are the same; they don't seem to think it matters. We always assumed it did. So much for English being impossible to spell- why did we have to learn it then?

Incidentally, as a language tutor, I am seeing a slight improvement in my students since the products of literacy hour started coming through to university: I no longer have to explain what a verb is. 12 years ago, we all had to start by explaining to the undergraduates that a verb is "a doing word". These days, they look bored and say "yes, they taught us that in infants".

I wonder then if we shouldn't return to a narrower and more rigorous/demanding curriculum at least till age 14 or so and then broaden out.

(It sounds as if my dp left school in the 1930s when you read my last post but actually I am not quite that old...=

I must say I generally prefer non-fiction books written pre-WW2. I just find they are so much better in terms of style,
clear sentence structure and so on. They are also generally understandable, mainly I think because they lack that heavy-handed (possibly American in origin) somewhat wearying academic feel which I find a lot of books have these days. They are often clear, straight-forward, plain English; they read well and make perfect sense at first reading. I hardly ever find anything of that quality in my field tbh written in recent years.

Interesting post, Cory.

I think it's to do with a general unwillingness to be good at anything which is permeating the whole British psyche.
We celebrate mediocrity. We don't dare tell a teacher that their spelling/grammar is unacceptable for fear of hurting their feelings, we don't let our kids get mucky/take part in competitions for fear they'll get hurt, or lose.
People all over the place positively rejoice in being "rubbish at spelling/grammar" like it's something to be proud of. Nowhere else in Europe certainly, and I imagine, also further afield, would you find people who don't care that they are no longer able to express themselves properly in their native language.

I think, as pp have said, it is changing back, with the reintroduction of literacy etc. In the late 70s, at my wacky progressive comp, we did blocks of lessons, 6 weeks of metalwork coupled with 6 weeks of English language. That was the importance placed on English then.

do you think the flag is getting a bit battered?

That's true, we are a bit proud of being hopeless at spelling etc, totally incomprehensible to the rest of the world - who a) can spell b) would not admit to not being to

LOl bucharest at your metalwork. I remember lying in a field having to write a poem about the sun. I don't think anyone actually got it finished even

Bucharest could probably make us a new flagpole what with all that metalwork experience.

All the people who think spelling and grammar are optional are in for a ruddy shock when China takes over as top dog nation - learning English is extraordinarily easy compared to learning Cantonese or Mandarin and I don't think the Chinese will put up with the kind of lazy attitudes that prevail here.

Blimey .... I bet none of the children in her class talk as badly as she does [hm]