From the Archives – Learning to Diagram a Sentence

When a teacher is suddenly called away from their classroom by illness or some emergency, it can be a crisis. One morning in the 1980s, an eighth-grade English teacher at Saint Mary School called in sick at the last minute. The principal, Sister Maureen Minihane, quickly found a substitute, but the ailing teacher had left no lesson plans or the teacher’s edition of the textbook for the substitute to use.

Father Joseph Loftus, an assistant at Saint Mary, luckily walked into the school office at that moment and learned of the predicament. “No problem,” he said, “I’ll come up and teach them how to diagram a sentence.” (A valuable way to teach grammar when he was a schoolboy.) The lesson went well; Father Loftus was well-liked by the children. The relieved substitute never told him that this was an English literature class, not grammar!

— Kitty Guy, Parish Historian

In 2020, to commemorate the 225th anniversary of our parish, we started “From the Archives” as a weekly feature online and in our bulletin to spotlight the history of Saint Mary’s. Due to its popularity, we are continuing the series. An archive of the features is located here.