how you learn

eng lang lessons were certainly useless in my school, precisely for the reason you say: they taught hardly anything that most of us didn't learn passively from our own reading. those of us that didn't were hardly likely to learn it in a classroom. the stuff that they did teach was next to pointless too. e.g. i still don't know the correct layout for a cv, but in the event of receiving a gift from an elderly relative i can write a perfectly phrased thank you letter. i think curua should come in on this one, if he's not too busy with his marking.

*putting Shaun's 'What I did at the weekend' piece aside* Weeeellll....when I was at school we did no grammar whatsoever, as it was then out of fashion to teach it, and I went on to do an English degree, so I can't say that I needed it. Furthermore, during my teacher training by so-called 'grammar specialists', it emerged that even they didn't have a clue what they were on about... David Blunkett does seem to think it's vitally important, though, and is now ramming it down children's throats at the expense of everything else, in his attempt to create a nation of robot-children that are only thought of as statistics. Personally, I think children should learn what will be useful in as fun a way as possible, and that should not intrude on the creative, enjoyable aspects of english. National Literacy Strategy, my arse. Can I go back to marking now?

I'm not too sure about this. I was not taught grammar and had to pick most of the terms up and learn about sentence strucutre from my Greek lessons. Now (ironically) that I'm studying for an English degree my grammar is falling to pieces and I'm finding it difficult to express myself. I think perhaps a compromise would be best where children are given the foundations up to a point, but then after that they're allowed to endulge the creative side.

I finally got this far. 'strucutre?' = stitches in Greece? Sorry 'poeples poet' I'll go now. ps My wife is a female curua. I have to live this thread every day of my life!

Strucutre - see that's prescisely what I mean! I'm falling apart at the seams. Heeeeeelp! Someone beat me with a big book of English usuage.