Pants on Fire

If you recognize the above then I am sorry for you. It means that you had, at least once in your life, a teacher who believed that creating something like this would help you to become a better writer and speaker of English. I am an English teacher who believes no such thing. But I teach this skill like it is sacrilege to forego it--with such fervor and seeming importance as I myself find it hard to believe. I have added articles and adjectives to the basic subject and verb structure of a sentence diagram today and as a result was asked by one of my brighter students the very same question I asked my graduate school professor of the History of the English Language when he introduced me to this, this...silliness: Why do we need to know how to do this?

I answered her as though I have been prepared all my life to answer questions I don't know the answers to.

I lied.

I told her that learning to diagram sentences would help her to understand the parts of speech better. I told her that learning to diagram sentences would help her to understand how sentences are formed better and so make her a better speaker and writer of English. And because you should be a trustworthy and upstanding person if you have my job, she believed me. I looked her right in the eyes and said to her words which will never be true for me.

What I could have said was that diagramming sentences can be fun, that it's like a puzzle you have to figure out with words and phrases, clauses and all of the grammatical pieces. I might have said that. It is that for me. I thought that it was ridiculous to sell it pretending it does something it doesn't do but I do like being given a complex sentence and being able to figure out the "picture" of that sentence. It makes me happy when I get it right. Brain teaser stuff. Like sudoku?

Anyway. I am an old-fashioned English teacher today. I pretend that breaking apart a sentence in this manner will help you to better understand how it then goes back together. I lie to innocent and not-so-innocent children about ways to improve their grammar. In this I do not buck the establishment. In this I do not want anyone saying about my students that they were denied a necessary portion of their grammatical education. So I persist.

I feel guilty, though. Like a follower. Like I'm not a revolutionary. But I've started now. Don't see how I can do a take-back.