teens in "top private schools" - UK

Another interesting article on the Basic Writing Skills site: Spelling it out for them:

A lot of teachers were astonished when, a few weeks after arriving as headmaster of Brighton college, a top private school, I decided to bring in compulsory spelling, grammar and punctuation classes for all 13-year-olds.

Why did I take such a radical step? Well, unusually for a head, I still teach every day so I regularly had the opportunity to inspect the written work of our youngest pupils. What I saw startled me.

In the school's year 9 classes some children had clearly never been taught how to punctuate properly, paragraph or spell. Bright children, particularly some of those who had joined our college from state primary schools, were making worrying howlers.

What sort of howlers? I am a history teacher so the howler that leapt out at me when I inspected year 9 books was children's tendency to add a totally unnecessary apostrophe to dates — as in the “1920's”. Then there was the almost daily confusion between “their” and “there”, an apparent inability to understand the difference between the colon and the semi-colon and passages that suggested that the writer had no clue what the subjunctive does.

I also noticed an endearing but baffling tendency to start a new paragraph almost at random. Some of the younger teenagers tended to start paragraphs every nine lines, presumably when they thought it was time for a break, instead of to introduce a new idea or theme.

When I asked my head of English to note errors from a set of marking he came up with (among other offerings): “I got sent out of class for yorning”; “potatoe's” and “this is the man which I saw”.

Around one in three 13-year-olds made mistakes — although I should make it clear that children who attended our prep school were not among them. Rather, it is some children from the state sector who have been let down and this is in spite of the government's much-vaunted literacy strategy.

Latin

Thirty years ago people understood how English grammar worked but we have lost this knowledge since the demise of Latin in schools.

Is this true?

Is it easier to learn English grammar taking Latin than to learn English grammar studying the English language?


lexical nullity and syntactical bankruptcy

In universities writing fellows are now having to give one-to-one tuition to students who struggle to compose extended sentences, never mind essays. As one of the fellows — who was quoted in an article in this paper last week — put it, these students suffer from “lexical nullity and syntactical bankruptcy”.

There is a lost generation who have never been taught grammar, punctuation or spelling. Even some of the teachers around have not been taught these skills and so they do not spot pupils' errors — something I noticed in one of my early jobs when I spotted incorrect apostrophes on report records. You cannot teach children if you don't have the skills yourself.

source:
Education investment fails poorest UK pupils

That's my problem.

I was never taught grammar and, as a direct result, I can't teach grammar to my child.

I'm looking forward to learning grammar, but I'm not seeing when, where, or how that's going to happen given everything else that's going on.