Speak Softly and Carry a Big Yardstick

Detention:
“What are you in for?”
“Not getting my lines straight because I broke my ruler beatin‘ a guy to death.”

I had an English teacher (Mrs P) when I was in the 8th grade that was so old school. How old school was she? She wore doubleknit slacks and nurse’s shoes and she was about 80 years old. She had been my mom’s jr. high PE teacher. How does one go from being a PE teacher to an English teacher? It seemed like an unrealistic jump until the day she said we were going to be learning to diagram sentences. That is the equivalent to climbing a rope to ring a stupid bell. We sat there looking at her like a bunch of google-eyed loons. Remember, this is 1985, not 1885.

She demonstrated, but it was all lunacy. She was so strict about the straight edge, that if our lines were crooked, we lost points on it. “Please let us go back to reading the watered-down Scholastic version of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ and doing ditto worksheets about possessive pronouns!”
It made us long for 7th grade where we read the watered-down Scholastic version of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and wrote Haikus.

Well, those days were over. It was time to grow up, and fast. I’d like to say that I slapped myself in the face and said, “Hand me that chalk and ruler, I’m goin’ in, Coach”, but it was more like me pulling my peach colored velcro kangaroos as far under the desk as I could get them and hunkering down in my seat. My heart was beating so hard that I was afraid Edgar Allan Poe was going to jump out of the 7th grade anthology and enter the 8th grade room at any moment. “Please, bury me under the floorboards, Mr. Poe!” I would make the newspaper, ‘Recent Parsings’….
I should have sent her a dia-gram
Western Union
MRS P STOP

Needless to say, I survived English class and never diagramed another sentence again. Kids, don’t believe teachers when they tell you you will be using fractions in your everyday adult life. You actually can pay people to figure the cubic area of your living room carpet. Diagraming sentences is even more unnecessary than figuring cubic feet! Besides, who knew you would need a ruler in English class?

Here is a sentence for you, Mrs. P:
Mrs. P should have been fired for teaching us unnecessary crap.

Mrs. P is the subject
Fired is the verb
For teaching is a prepositional phrase
Unnecessary is an adjective
Holy corn! It stuck.