Category: Nothing Was Easy

How I Became a Latin Lover – Over My Shoulder

My romance with Latin was far from love at first sight. It was a long and difficult romance that led me to major in Classics as an undergraduate and ultimately earn a PhD in Classics. The romance started in 9th grade, when I took Latin 1. My school offered a rigorous curriculum. In my freshman year (9th grade), I took both French and Latin, English, Algebra I, World History, and Old Testament (my required religion class). This course load exposed the deficiencies in my abbreviated education.

Algebra I proved to be very difficult. Doing my Algebra homework was so time consuming that I always started it first, as soon as I got home from school. I struggled particularly with how to set up and solve word problems. My previous math classes had not emphasized word problems. They were a new mystery for me to solve. I would toil and agonize over each problem. I often had to recopy my homework to make it presentable. The eraser holes, the grubby pencil marks and tear stains were not to be seen on the pristine paper that my teacher received.

Each day after completing my Algebra homework, I would tackle my Latin assignments. Latin is a fully inflected language with a flexible word order. I had no trouble learning the vocabulary portion of each new lesson. It was simply matter of learning new words. The declensions for nouns and adjectives were baffling and the conjugation and tenses for verbs added to the mystery sauce.

My teacher was an elderly nun who was very hard of hearing. At the time I was both timid and soft-spoken, quite afraid of making a mistake. The class terrified me. Instead of agilely reciting the declension or conjugation on command, my mind would blank and I would stumble along. I dreaded Algebra and Latin. My other classes came easily. My French teacher had no problem with my reluctance to speak up. Since the focus was on building vocabulary and simple grammar, I excelled.

End of the year exams were very important at my school. I made it through Algebra with surprising success. My nightly toil paid off. I solved the problems on the exam very satisfactorily. My Latin 1 exam was a meltdown. The teacher recognized that my exam did not reflect the usual quality of my work. It was so bad that I had to retake the exam. I worked hard and did very well on my second exam.

Latin 2 was far less difficult and demanding. Caesar’s wars intrigued me. I started to enjoy puzzling through a translation and was even able to recite in class with some fluidity. At the end of the year, I decided to take Latin 3 in my junior year. A different nun from my Latin 1 and 2 teacher taught Latin 3 and 4. She was medievalist so instead of reading Cicero and Vergil in Latin 3 and 4, the standard fare for third and fourth year Latin students, we read medieval authors. Dipping into the Middle Ages helped me understand the extent and significance of Latin literature.

I stopped taking French after my sophomore year and signed up to take Greek! It was an unusual opportunity. My school’s rector had been a student in Egyptology before becoming a priest. He read Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and hieroglyphics. He was brilliant. He also did calculus for enjoyment and taught my fourth-year math class. I was the only student brave enough to take Greek. It was a wonderful experience. I learned Homeric Greek and in Greek 1 read Book 1 of the Iliad. The next year, I took Greek 2 and was introduced to Herodotus and read the first book of his Histories. It was fascinating.

When I got to college, I had already had four years of Latin and two years of Greek. I had no intention of pursuing a degree in Classics. I expected my troubled romance with Latin would end with satisfying my college foreign language requirement. I wanted to study Botany, but that was not to be.

Freshman placement exams were a bit of misery for me. My college required every incoming student to take a speech test. Each student had to read a paragraph aloud for a group of teachers. If you passed the test, you were exempt from taking a speech class; otherwise, you had to sign up for and pass the speech course before graduation.

By the time I entered college, I had developed a nasty stutter from all the stress and pressure to achieve academic success. The panel of speech testers didn’t even let me get three sentences into the paragraph, before I was signaled to stop reading. It soon became clear that there was in fact a third option. If a student could not qualify for speech class, the student was assigned to speech clinic. There was no credit given for speech clinic.

I received a notice that I had to go to speech clinic. In a way it was a blessing. The college had a robust speech pathology department. My visits to the speech clinic reduced my stutter and taught me many tactics that I’ve used to reduce my stutter and speech anxiety. I took the required speech class my sophomore year, with the clinic’s blessing, and was able to fulfill my graduation requirement.

The language placement was a big surprise. My four years of Latin qualified me for the most advanced class. This meant that I would only have to take one year of Latin to satisfy the college’s language requirement. I expected to break off my troubled romance with Latin by the end of my freshman year. It seemed like a great idea. The class was Latin poetry – Catullus, Ovid and Horace. It was magic. It came easily for me. The teacher was engaging and made each line of the poems glow. It was my easiest course. I looked forward to class and did my assignments eagerly. All my toil started to pay off. My final exam was a breeze. What I did not expect was a letter from the department acknowledging how well I had done and recommending that I take the second half of the poetry course and sign up for another higher-level poetry class. How much higher quickly became apparent. The University had just started offering a graduate degree in Classics. The advanced class was a graduate-level (500) course. I was assured that if I still decided to major in some other discipline, the upper level Latin class would simply count as a part of my electives. I signed up for the class. I had fallen in love with Latin poetry. Thus, the romance began in earnest. I became a Latin lover.

Accepting College – Over My Shoulder

When a friend recently asked me to write a college recommendation for her daughter, I reflected on how the times have changed. The entire college entry process has evolved as more students go to college. When I was preparing to enter college, parents did not take their children on extended weeklong college preview tours. A prospective student might visit a campus or so and meet with admissions officials, but it was not a must do part of college application and entry. There were no websites with lovely pictures and descriptions of campus life, no online catalogues.

All the information was in a paper catalogue. Many high schools, including mine, had a library of recent catalogues that students could peruse. My school did not have a guidance counselor to help students with the process of identifying and selecting the college that would fit their needs. Parents, students and the vice-principal, a nun, worked together to make the college decisions. In all fairness, there were only eighteen students in my graduating class, most knew exactly where they wanted to go to college. The intellectual talent level in my class was quite varied, from those who qualified as National Merit Scholars to girls for whom junior college or finishing school was in their future. I fell into the top part of my class, took the hardest classes and a heavy academic load. Advanced Placement classes were also not yet widespread or offered by my school. I would have taken them, if they had been available.

My parents made my college choice. My future college was preordained. At first, I did not quite realize how preordained it was. In my junior year, like my classmates, I sent away catalogues and reviewed the school’s stash of information. I dreamed of going away to college, having a little agency over my life and being able to be a typical college student. It wasn’t in the cards. My parents had grown wiser than when my older sister was applying to college.

My sister is nine years older than me. She was sent to a prestigious boarding school on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. How this came about is her story not mine, but it impacted me. She took an extra year of high school, so that she could spend more time learning studio art. She was not a strong student, so her college admission was an anxious concern for my parents. It was not where she would go, but rather where she could go. She was finally accepted to the same state university where I would later go. She was a commuter student, a far cry from her boarding school experience. For a long time, she carried an air of resentment about being forced to go to the state college.

Because I skipped a grade and my sister took five years for high school, our nine-year gap shrank. I entered college in 1963 just five years after she graduated in 1959. My parents reasoned that I had done well in high school, did not have special talents (read musical) that would need nurturing in a specialty school, so I could or should just follow my sister’s lead. Mind you, she had spent most of her college years degrading the school, her fellow students and the campus.

The decision was made. I was to go to college where my sister went. An ugly scene ensued – tears and disappointment, but I made a peace with it. I was urged by my parents to apply to two other campuses of the state university; both were in dangerous urban settings. They were to be my backup schools, just in case I did not get into my “first choice.” I dutifully mailed my applications by the deadlines. There was no early admission/acceptance schedule. Most colleges would send out acceptance letters in late winter. By March 15, the college acceptance rodeo was over. College acceptances were sent to my high school, and the nun would proudly read them at our daily assembly – mail call. The letters were also posted on a bulletin board. My first acceptance arrived before the Christmas holidays. It was a matter of just a few weeks before I received notices from all three schools that they would welcome me into their freshman class. I was the first member of my class to receive a college acceptance letter. At the time it felt like a participation or consolation prize. I vowed to make the most of my college career.