Teachers Ill-equipped To Teach Grammar Because They Never Received Instruction.

[Rikurzhen]

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My hands were feeling clammy and beads of sweat broke out under my collar as I shifted nervously in my seat. It was parents’ evening.

As a teacher with six years’ experience, you might imagine that I would have been in my element as I chatted about the eight-year-olds in my charge and offered their parents encouragement and advice.

Instead I was consumed with embarrassment. And no wonder. The father opposite me — a lawyer — was looking at me as if I was dirt under his shoe.

I had been telling him about the new drive to improve literacy standards in our school when he had interrupted me.

‘Can you repeat what you just said?’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I could possibly have heard you correctly.’

I had no idea why he was getting so agitated. To humour him, I repeated slowly: ‘I said that me and the headmistress are doing all we can to improve standards.’

I might as well have told him that we were planning to bring back the birch. Throwing his hands up in the air, he launched into a tirade that left me red hot with shame.

‘Me and the headmistress?’ he ranted. ‘Don’t you know it should be: “The headmistress and I”? How can you call yourself a teacher when your grammar is so poor?’

I wanted the ground to swallow me up. Many years later, I still feel there was no excuse for his rudeness, but I can understand why he was so angry. I’d feel the same if a child of mine was being taught by a teacher like me.

And the shocking truth is that there are thousands of teachers in schools the length and breadth of the country who are just like me.

We have degrees in English from respectable universities, yet wouldn’t know a subjective pronoun from an objective one if it hit us in the face. . . . .

The stark truth is that most people educated in a state school in the Seventies and Eighties had little or no grounding in grammar. And many of us have become teachers. Scarred ourselves, we have passed the damage on.

I’m convinced the rot started in 1964 when Harold Wilson’s Labour government came to power and abolished the 11-plus in many areas. Parents were told this was to enable primary schools to develop a more informal, child-centred, progressive style of teaching, with the emphasis on learning by discovery.

As a teacher, I can see this is rubbish. The belief that grammar could be ignored was virtually all pervasive until 1988, when the Conservative government introduced the National Curriculum.

I’m 43 and from the day I started junior school in Solihull in 1979, I experienced a grammar-free education until I left comprehensive school in 1987.

For me and many of my peers, there is a vast chasm in our knowledge and basic abilities. While previous generations had grammar drilled into them and were taught by rote, we were encouraged to get ‘a feel’ for sentences.

This left me with a terrible grounding in the three Rs. Basic grammatical rules elude me. When do you use ‘which’ or ‘that’? Is the bag ‘hers’ or ‘her’s’? Until recently, I didn’t even know there were different types of nouns.

I wasn’t taught any of this at secondary school. I even managed to get a degree in English literature from Sussex University — the alma mater of novelist Ian McEwan — without anyone pulling me up on my diabolical use of the language.

And I sailed through my teacher training as a mature student before landing my first job in a state primary school in South Yorkshire.

I had been in the job only a few weeks when I learned, with a sickening sense of dread, that part of my literacy duties was to instruct my nine-year-old pupils on the use of ‘modal verbs’.

I had never heard of them and rushed home that night to research them on Google. Only then did I discover they are words such as ‘can’ and ‘could’, ‘shall’ and ‘should’, which are used to describe if something is certain, probable or possible​

 

[saveliberty]

The English often use the word me differently.