in the corner of my mind

My little Latin 1 students are taking their final exam right now, and I'm a bit more emotional than I thought I would be. This has been my first experience teaching a year-long course, and, I have to say, it pretty much totally rocked. I think the online setting smoothes over any possible issues with teaching high school students in a real classroom - I never have to see their bored faces, or shush them for whispering to their friends, hand out bathroom passes, or try to ignore the hand that is always raised. Why, I can even update my blog while they take an exam.

I think the best part, though, has been teaching a new crop of would-be Latinists all the same silly mnemonic devices I learned, and then watch them make all the same dumb jokes my friends and I made. Every time we learn a new Ablative, the 'another Ablative' jokes just come rolling out in TextChat ( 'idk: the ablative of ignorance?' 'the ablative of I hate Caesar'), and I get the same questions that I asked back in the day, which inevitably start with 'why did the Romans...', as though Cicero sat down one day and just created the Dative of Agent to piss everyone off.

Tomorrow we head off to Rome on the jet plane, and I feel like I'm just reliving my high school Latin club trip to Italy. I've finished Latin 2, I've learned the Subjunctive, so now I can go clap about Italians calling pools 'piscina'. I think I might even make the trek out to see Laocoon and experience again getting ditched by my tour group (shout out to the notoriousmle - that day at mcdonald's is still one of the best days ever).

So guess all I'm really trying to say is that teaching this class has let me reminisce about high school Latin, which was a pretty solid four years of good times and good people. Actually, up until graduate school, I've loved all my Latin classes, and my instructors, and the bond I made with the other students in the class. It's just very cool to be on the other side of that now and see my own students create their own nerdy inside jokes and send me goofy text messages like 'morituri te salutant' before quizzes.

If only they got my Brady Bunch 'caveat emptor' reference.