What are you tolerating? Fronted adverbials?

Last week our hot water packed up altogether and we called our fabulous plumber. At first, we thought it was a simple case of replacing a two way valve. What we did not mention to the boiler manufacturer was the age of ours. So, the first plumber to arrive, was looking to replace a valve that did not exist. Then he sent for the boss...who, incidentally, I used to teach. He is above crawling into airing cupboards now but he worked out what it was. Our old system is gravity fed and the coil in the hot water tank was filled with crap from the tank in the loft and it needed to be flushed out. This involved getting into the loft to the header tank and flushing the system out; refilling it and rebalancing the radiators. It was a long, noisy day but by the end we had a fabulous supply of really hot water and we realised we had been tolerating an increasingly useless system over months possibly even years! It just crept up on us gradually…..like fronted adverbials!

 I am a HUGE fan of MIcael Rosen and I was introduced to one of his articles published in The Guardian  in his series ‘From a curious parent’ and addressed to that well known fireplace salesman, Gavin Williams Secretary of State for Education.

‘Families homeschooling in lockdown are discovering the full horror of the primary grammar curriculum and they’re mystified.’

Rosen goes on to describe it as: 

‘..a package of outdated, rigid, misleading, prescriptive, disputed terms all based on the false assumption that ‘grammar’ is either right or wrong.’ (Our plumbing error was looking for a valve that did not exist and was unnecessary)

Jeremy Williams, a professional writer and a parent currently involved in homeschooling observed in a recent tweet that the primary grammar curriculum displayed a ‘joyless obsession with the mechanics of language.’

Rosen argues that the primary curriculum has become: 'instructions on how to write. It is writing by numbers.’ 

‘We are writers. One way of working out how to help primary schoolchildren to write may have been to get writers to explain how we do it. I have interviewed quite a few writers, and I’ve learned that we do it in many different ways. There is a plurality and flexibility. We avoid the rigid, prescriptive, formulaic approach being demanded in the primary school curriculum.'

I distinctly remember an incident from my own secondary school days at Harwich County Grammar School in the 1960’s. We were given the essay title:’ The Unwelcome Visitors’  in an end of year English Exam. I wrote about a real life incident we had witnessed in a game park in Kenya. A herd of elephants regularly passed through the accommodation and this night they discovered a fresh bunch of plantains in a small Volkswagen beetle belonging to some of the guests. The matriarch picked up the car and shook it until the bananas fell out of the broken windscreen.

I remember being quite proud of myself as I had written from my own, first hand experience of living in Africa during my primary school years. I was, however, marked down by my English teacher Mr F., because this was not the ‘correct’ subject material. We were meant to write about the stale, cliche of guests always outstaying their welcome etc etc. Naturally I felt aggrieved and talked about it at home with my mum who happened to teach Domestic Science at the same school. She and Mr F had a stand up row in the smoke filled staffroom the next day as she supported my imaginative and factual interpretation of the essay title.

It did not deter me as I knew I wanted to teach and English was my passion. I jumped through the usual hoops and taught for more than 30 years in a mixed comprehensive school in North Oxfordshire. I jumped ship to the Drama department when I could not bear the thought of teaching ‘Your Shoes’ ONE MORE TIME to my GCSE classes. No offence Michele Roberts I loved your short story at the start….

Now I find myself rubbing up against this dry, soulless, life draining, primary grammar curriculum because I have volunteered to tutor a 6 year old boy who was catching up after the first lockdown.

Well we won’t tolerate it and what’s more, we will have fun!

It is definitely time to flush the system out and rebalance the radiators...those teachers, who despite everything, still manage to enthuse their students with a love of the quirkiness of our amazingly rich language.