Sunday, starting over
Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 10:38AM 
On Memorial Day we had dinner with some friends, one of whom is an English teacher at a posh private high school here in Marin. We were discussing the practice of diagramming sentences, because of a question that had come up in one of the private tutoring sessions she offers after school and on weekends to make ends meet. As if teaching high schoolers English full-time weren't enough...
Anyway, I realized over the course of that conversation that I never learned how to diagram sentences the way she was demonstrating it -- that just wasn't a thing we ever did at the French American Bilingual School, where I was a student through 7th grade, or at Everett Junior High or at Lowell. I do recall quite a lot of use of my Bic 4-color pen, underlining in red, click, circling in green, click, annotating in blue. But never like the diagram at left. Nope. Never.