Diagramming the Sentence

When I was in the 2nd grade, my mom was driving my friend and me home from Wednesday Night Supper at church. My friend, a girl considerably lacking in her rhetorical skills, began a story with "We had ate...," to which I replied "I don't understand, what had you done?" She snapped back at me something about me understanding perfectly well what she meant, and she probably didn't talk to me again for the rest of the ride home.
Little did I know that my life would carry on this way. A guy in my 9th grade English class asked me if "the" was a verb. A soon-to-be ex boyfriend said, "I can't believe he did that to him and I." A few months ago, a guy handed me a note and his phone number in a Thai restaurant. I did not call back because he used the incorrect form of "too." I guess you could say I'm a grammar snob.
Wait, wait though -there's more to it than that. I have a highly marketable B.A. in English and Film Studies, and am now pursuing the even more marketable MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction. These things make it ok for me to be obsessed with words, right? On top of it all, I'm a TA for English 101. I don't really know why my job title is "Teaching Assistant," since I have yet to meet the teacher I am assisting. As far as I can tell, I have my own class (listed under my name), and I get to design the syllabus myself. The only thing that I did not get a choice in was the book order, which tragically lacks a grammar book (more on that later).
I am also taking a class in the pedagogy of rhetoric, which appears to be geared towards making me feel inferior, as someone who is earning a mere MFA instead of a PhD. That's right, instead of researching and writing a dissertation over the course of several years, I will be completing a novel. By May. In this class, I am learning that the world of Composition/Rhetoric (and which of these titles is correct- ah, there's the rub!) is much more controversial than I had previously thought it to be. At the school where I got my undergraduate degree,the rhet/comp teachers seemed so happy. Evidently though, the world of rhet/comp is so dark that it has driven faculty members at various universities to do things as devious as putting sugar in other faculty member's gas tanks (I reference rhetorician Sharon Crowley here).
And thus I begin what is to be a series of meditations on words, students, being a student, and the cataclysmic disaster that occurs when all of these forces collide. For now, however, it's off to Happy Nails for my pedicure.