Last week, I walked into my Latin teacher’s office, sat down, and told him that I was a complete fraud. I told him that I felt like I knew nothing, and that I had somehow fooled everyone into thinking I was good at Latin when in fact I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
This moment had been building up for weeks. I don’t interact much with other Latin students, simply because they’re all, well, still taking Latin classes that I finished last year. That means I don’t have much of a basis for comparison; all I have is myself versus the probably-too-chaotic schedule I set up for myself. Every time a section took longer to translate than I expected it to, or I missed an obvious grammar construction (looking at you, indirect commands!) I felt, to put it plainly, like a complete and utter failure.
I told Dr. Robert M all of this: that I know the grammar rules, I just never seem to be able to identify them in original texts. That everyone says I’m great at Latin, but I’m only getting through 200 words a week.
He told me that Roman authors - and especially the poets - love to break the rules. That I learned the grammar constructs, and I’m now trying to play a game where they’ve all been turned on their heads. That the transition from textbooks to original texts is a process that takes years and most Classicists don’t really get to the point where they’re comfortable with original texts until graduate school.
I’m seventeen. I’m still in high school. Just because I’m good at Latin, just because I’ve been taking it for six years, doesn’t mean that I should - or even could - be perfect.
