For the third time this year my son has gone to bed crying over Irish. His teacher gives him a weekly test of Irish verbs, an all-but meaningless list that he simply cannot get his head around. He can’t translate most of the words and when I try to help him with that he says it doesn’t matter, the teacher is not testing them on what the words mean. It doesn’t even matter, he says, if he knows how to pronounce them. It’s just the spelling she’s testing.

Needless to say he finds this very frustrating and difficult. The fact that he has a mild learning difficulty doesn’t help, but honestly I don’t see the point of this kind of learning for any child.

My son has struggled with literacy in English since he started school, but with the help of resource teaching he has made great strides in his reading and writing and now, in fifth class, he is finally developing a bit of confidence around literacy.

However, like many of us, he tends to focus on what's not working rather than what is and gets very upset when he keeps getting miserable test results in Irish. I try to help him at home but to be honest, it would take the two of us hours to drum these spellings into him each week and I think it's a complete waste of time.

Rote learning
This is not language learning. This is a waste of effort and resources, both in school and at home.

I’ve spoken to his teacher about getting an exemption for him, but she says she believes he can learn to speak Irish if he just puts more time into it. With his dyslexia, his homework already takes twice the amount of time it should, and it doesn’t feel right to have a child of his age sitting doing homework for two or three hours every evening when he should be running around and being a child.

The last thing I want to land him with is even more time wasted on these useless tests.

I realise the teacher has a curriculum to complete so I don’t blame her. She probably hasn’t got much choice.

I know there are plenty of solid arguments for supporting the development of the Irish language but ultimately a language that is not spoken is like a song that is never played.

It’s an absurd and perverse activity to ask children to learn lists of words they can’t pronounce and don’t know the meaning of.

When are we going to cop on in relation to this subject? Either we need a completely different approach at primary level, one that involves chat and play and interaction, in short, immersion, or we should scrap it altogether and just offer it as a language elective at second level alongside French and other languages.

We cannot persist with this laborious, fruitless exercise in rote learning that leads children like my son to associate our native tongue with feelings of frustration, pressure and inadequacy.

This column gives a voice to those interested in education. Contributions welcome to education@irishtimes.com