A teacher trainer has put TikTok users through their paces with a SATs question – but even adults have found it tricky.
Two weeks after Year 6 pupils across the country sat their English, Maths and Science exams, 'Grammar Slammer' Sarah shared her latest spelling and grammar mini-quiz – challenging her 15,000 followers to rewrite a sentence in passive form.
Sarah shared the sentence: "The wind damaged the fence." She said the sentence was "currently active" and added: "We have 'wind' as the subject, 'damaged' as the verb and 'fence' is the object. To make it passive, we're going to move the object of the sentence to the beginning and make it the subject."
She explained: "So we'll start the new sentence with fence then we will take the verb 'to be' and use it in the simple past – 'was'. We then add the past participle of the verb, which is 'damaged' and stays the same.
"Then we need to say what damaged the fence and for that we use 'by' – so: 'The fence was damaged by the wind.'
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"If you're teaching the passive tense to children, it's much more important they understand why you use the passive tense rather than them doing this sort of nonsense. But if they have to – then this is the way to do it."
A think tank has called for SATs to be scrapped (stock) (Getty Images)Asked whether they got the teaser right, many fans admitted the question had gone over their heads. One TikTok user responded: "I have an English degree and I said 'what does passive mean?'" Another felt such knowledge was pointless, adding: "Honestly, apart from saying 'rephrase this' who needs to know it’s passive? When is that relevant to life?!"
A third added: "I work in a primary school and couldn’t answer this." Meanwhile a fourth admitted: "I genuinely have no idea whether a sentence is passive or active." And a fifth slammed: "You did a great job of explaining this but it does make me feel sad that this is a year 6 Language lesson. It’s so dull! I don’t remember learning this stuff yet got As for English GCSE."
The majority of those who did manage to answer correctly said it was purely down to "luck".
Last week, Sarah taught fans about comma placement with another brain-teaser. The question said: "Insert one comma into the correct place in the question below," which read: "Every night Dad and my brother take the dog for a walk."
She explained: "Commas are used in sentences to separate phrases and clauses" before adding that the statement contained an "adverbial phrase" which is "telling us when the action is happening." When an adverbial phrase appears at the beginning of a sentence, it is known as a "fronted adverbial".
She then shared the correct sentence should read: "Every night, Dad and my brother take the dog for a walk."
However the explanation appeared to go over some followers' heads. One person said: "I got it right, but didn't know the reason. It's just the place where it makes sense to take a breath."
Another agreed: "Commas are there to take a breath when reading out loud!" And a third said: "I got this right and I was taught its when you take a breath?"
However, Sarah was quick to dispel the "breath" theory and said it was important to teach children the correct terminology.
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