When I learned that the public schools had no intention of teaching my children to diagram a sentence -- nor to teach them anything much about "parts of speech" either -- I took matters into my own hands and became responsible for this part of their education. Although they were a bit grumpy at the time, they have since learned that (1) one cannot talk about language without knowing the names of its parts and (2) one can more easuly acquire another language if one has a better sense of how one's own operates. And they both write wonderfully.