As a teacher, I obviously have a lot of views on education but a particular section of our curriculum continues to throw up issues that I still haven’t found satisfactory answers for. As (or perhaps ‘if’) you read on, it’s important to note that we are told what to teach and that, even if we’re not entirely sure of the reasons behind teaching it, we ensure we understand our subjects sufficiently well to pass that knowledge onto our students. This brings me very neatly onto grammar.
We all use it. Some of us use it correctly and secretly applaud ourselves every time we notice that ‘they’re walking to their house, which is over there’. Some of us don’t use it correctly. The correct and incorrect use of grammar splits users of the English language into two very distinct groups, namely those who cannot, or don’t see it as a priority, and the internet-wide phenomenon that is the ‘Grammar Nazi’. For those of you unfamiliar with the Grammar Nazi, simply imagine an individual perusing various articles, blogs or posts on the internet. Rather than leave useful comments regarding the content they’ve read, they become engrossed in making absolutely sure that the author of said piece of writing is suddenly fully aware that they used a possessive apostrophe in vain!! Immediately, I have the image of anyone reading this arguing that they are part of a third group that are grammar experts but rise above the need to pass judgement on any poor, unfortunate soul who might have made the odd grammatical faux pas. To this imagined third group I say bollocks. You belong with the Grammar Nazis and are just irritated that they got their extremely accurate and cutting remark in before you did! I can say this full of confidence as I would certainly class myself as being in this imagined third group.
However, it isn’t the minor incorrect use of grammar that I struggle with (serial offenders are a different kettle of fish though. You should have a finite number of reminders for basics like capital letters and full stops before your right to the use of your opposable thumbs gets revoked). I appreciate that some people ‘was on their way home’ when, in fact, they ‘were’ on their way home. This often arises due to a local dialect passed on by parents or peers and is incredibly difficult to alter so isn’t there something more pressing or relevant that others could focus upon? I will have made grammatical errors in this very post and fully expect those who know me to point them out. But I’ll thank them for reading and then politely ignore their comment as it serves no real purpose. Everyone makes mistakes and having every little error picked out and scrutinised doesn’t help anyone. I suppose it might benefit you if you enjoy that brief moment of appearing superior to another human being just before they punch you in your smug, grammatically perfect face…
The point I’m slowly dragging myself around to is that the grammatical detail that school pupils are expected to understand is vast. I’d go as far as to say bits of it are unnecessary. I fully support the idea that children need to have a solid grammatical foundation. They need to know about full stops, commas and tenses. They need to know when to use a capital letter and the differences between formal and informal language. As I write this, I still find myself wondering why on earth an eight year old (or anyone, really) needs to know what a fronted adverbial is though. Grammar Nazis amongst you will obviously have picked out the fronted adverbial I used in my previous sentence but surely not even the likes of you can justify the need for a child to know it by name?? How about subordinate clauses? The present perfect tense? I’m not convinced even I know what the latter is! I know that I, along with a generation of current adults, were not taught grammar at school. I’ve had to teach myself the names for the various grammatical devices in order to understand exactly what the government wants us to pass onto the younger generation. Should our focus be that our future writers know the labels given to grammar or, more simply, that they can use that grammar effectively to write interesting articles or stories that are a joy to read? I am pretty certain I stole all my writing techniques from books I’ve read, and enjoyed, over the years rather than remembering what Miss Binks told me in English class!
So, in order for me to free up enough time to rectify some of the errors in this piece that will no doubt be pointed out to me, I’ll sign off with a little something that I heard the other day which I feel illustrates at least part of my most recent nonsense quite nicely:
“My old man can’t remember the name of half the tools in his garage but he’s stripped and rebuilt more engines than I’ve had hot dinners”.
The names of the tools you use are irrelevant, provided you know how to use them.
loquaciousnonesense 