This post was inspired by a little book from B&N, called Cave Canem: Beware of the dog, with little items about Latin phrases and life in Rome back in the day.
When I was in high school, my first year Latin teacher would often go around the room to see how much time everyone had spent on the homework. I was kind of embarrassed, and usually gave some vague reply. The fact is that most of the other students had spent 3 hours or so, and at that had only translated the first ten lines. I often was done in less than an hour, having translated the full 25 or so lines. It wasn't really my doing - Latin just came easily for me. I enjoyed the way the word endings told me where each word fit into the sentence, and (back in those days) I had a pretty good memory, so I didn't have to look up many vocabulary words.
I wanted to study classical Greek, but my school didn't offer it. As I recall, the only high school in the city that taught Greek was Gonzaga Prep - a boy's school. If I had been able to study Greek, I might not have met my future husband in French class (which he took because there was no class in German). Anyway, I got interested in Math because of the fine Math teacher/department head who gave a class called "Special Geometry." (These days it would be termed Honors Geometry, but that term had not yet arrived.) That's when I found out that Math could be even more fun than Latin.
So, in an alternate universe where I was not absorbed by Math, I might have gone to college to study classical languages, and probably become an old maid teacher of the subject.
I'm not sorry that it ended up as it did. My degree in Math got me into very interesting employment over the years.
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