Government cuts. Again. Soft targets? None softer than seven year olds.
This age group will be penalised for over-use of the exclamation mark when they do their government driven grammar tests this summer.
According to government guide lines exclamation marks should only be used with sentences that begin with "How" or "What," such as, "What stupidity on the part of the government!" or "What absolute balderdash!"
The more pedantically inclined amongst you will see that I personally have an aversion to exclamation marks in case they inadvertently make my writing look like a seven year old's.
In my teaching I have always tried to calm down the over-excited application of exclamation marks, and certainly have always attempted to remove a double exclamation mark on the grounds of refinement and taste.
The government has chosen to step in because of the proliferation of exclamation marks in social media.
Am I so cocooned in my world that I believe that most six and seven year olds will not yet be infected by exposure to social media? Or has the government found that texting amongst older children reveals such poor punctuation that they have decreed that bad habits should be strangled at birth, preferably, or at least by the age of seven?
So why the government has got a bee in its bonnet about this I really don't know. It strikes me that the fundamentals of literacy require far more attention.
Spelling, for example, needs to be taught properly from an early age in an analogous word-family approach. At the moment my six year old grandson is being given a number of totally disparate words to learn each week because they are on some government must-learn list. It won't kill him and he will be able to learn them despite this unnecessarily haphazard approach.
There are, however, many other children for whom this will be a painful and unsuccessful experience, and for the dyslexics this will be a complete waste of time.
If only successive governments allowed teachers to teach instead of hamstringing their teaching methods to make the results 'quantifiable'. Tick-box teaching means that children have no room to think outside the box.
And as for testing all the time.. my old granny used to say, "You can't fatten a pig by weighing it!"
No comments:
Post a Comment