A new study by UCL and York University found grammar lessons don’t help children to write creatively.A new study by UCL and York University found grammar lessons don’t help children to write creatively.Last modified on Sun 6 Mar 2022 08.01 GMTfrom University College London and York University, which says that grammar lessons don’t help children write stories.
None of which comes as a surprise to me. I was introduced to fronted adverbials in 2020, when I was home schooling my son, Matt. It wasn’t an easy time, I’m sure you’ll remember, and as I reeled from trying to navigate a changed world, I was stunned by how much of the actual difficulty in my comparatively fortunate daily life came from the agony of trying to help Matt with his grammar lessons.
Dear reader, it was awful. Now, admittedly Matt is dyslexic, hypermobile and struggles to sit still, which adds complexity to his learning, but I am none of those things and it made me want to cry too. Surely this can’t be right, I thought. Surely if a highly literate writer can’t understand or see the point in the lesson then there must be something wrong in inflicting this on all 10-year-olds? Because it wasn’t just difficult to grasp, most of it would lead to bad writing.
The saddest thing for me about the education system, as I have witnessed it, is that it seems almost intentionally calculated to create anxious children, parents and teachers. Matt was only four the first time I was told he was “behind the benchmark”, which I still think is an obscene and revolting way to describe any child, and this emphasis on his shortcomings and failures has continued. The irony is that none of it will really matter in the future.
Incomprehensible how so many in the past learned both grammar and how to express their creativity. Either that, or none of the great creatives of the present and the past learned under a 'Kafkaesque grammar system'.