Latin lovers
At Montgomery High School, instructor Jennifer Lehman, left, begins Latin class at 7 a.m. before the start of regular classes. She's a retired Ursuline High School teacher who uses her Latin class until 8 am and then leaves the school.
MARK ARONOFF / The Press DemocratPublished: Sunday, April 5, 2009 at 5:10 p.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, April 5, 2009 at 5:10 p.m.
The cars begin pulling to the curb at Montgomery High in Santa Rosa at 6:45 a.m. Sleepy teens pile out, heading to classes that start an hour before first period.
In Room 50, Latin teacher Jennifer Lehman welcomes a decidedly retro group of students. Her 32 pupils are the only teens studying Latin in the county’s public high schools, according to the Sonoma County Office of Education.
“I love this class,” said the 65-year-old instructor with 44 years of classroom experience.
“I’m teaching five levels of Latin at once to four different classes in a 50-minute session,” she said. “It is so cool, you just can’t believe it.”
Latin language classes are a rarity these days. They still can be found in some parochial schools, and some determined students sign up for Latin at Santa Rosa Junior College. Private tutoring is available.
But teachers and students say that where Latin is taught, devotion and sacrifice can be found.
Lehman’s students gather five mornings a week for 7 a.m. classes. Despite the hour, they exhibit enthusiasm and energy.
“The nice part about Latin is it’s like a puzzle. Some days I have to look up every other word. Some days, every word,” said sophomore honors student Graham Miller, 16.
He said he took Latin for the challenge and was rewarded recently when visiting his brother, who is attending Princeton University.
“In a campus courtyard there was something carved into the cement in Latin. I could just read it. It was about how families that support Princeton had never let Princeton down,” Miller said.
Once a staple of American high schools, Latin today is mostly known as the script carved into granite buildings or gracing currency, legal documents and medication instructions.
Yet Latin, the unspoken language, speaks to us still. Carpe diem (seize the day), semper fidelis (forever faithful) and ad infinitum (without limit) are common Latin terms interwoven into daily communication.
It also is valuable in understanding other languages.
“In history, we were watching a film about the Holocaust. It had German language in it and I could see how German and Latin had similarities,” said Allison Brooke, a 15-year-old honors sophomore in Lehman’s class. “I recognize connections between other languages and Latin all the time.”
The near-demise of Latin instruction has made the hiring of teachers for public institutions challenging.
“It’s sort of a chicken-or-the-egg thing. It’s hard to hire someone full-time when you are starting a class ... with a few students,” said Ron Everett, Petaluma district director of education. His district does not provide Latin instruction.
“I’ve had students express interest, but at this time adding more programs is probably not in the picture,” he said.
Several students said Latin class is their best bet for improving SAT scores. Numerous studies link the study of Latin with improved SAT results.
“The SAT’s are incredibly language-based. The questions are so often based on prefixes and suffixes,” said Lehman.
Lehman taught at Montgomery High School, retiring in 2002 after 37 years in classrooms. But she missed teaching Latin and returned to teach one Latin class at Montgomery. At the same time she was hired as head of the English department at Ursuline, the Catholic girls’ high school just north of Santa Rosa, where she also has taught Latin for the past seven years.
Lehman swears teaching Latin is a blast, and her colleague Julie Meyer agrees. Meyer teaches Latin to 31 students from Ursuline and Cardinal Newman high schools. She stresses that Latin is a gateway to Romance languages and helps students who will eventually study medicine or law.
Meyer said she quickly fell in love with Latin in college.
“Latin seemed like a no-brainer. The stories, the myths, pretty much all the lessons learned when studying Latin pulled me in,” she said.
She feels that the discipline of Latin gives students an edge in developing advanced study skills.
Her students have their own reasons for taking Latin.
“I take Latin because it helps me understand complicated English vocabulary, such as ostentatious, which means ‘showy.’ In Latin, ostendit means ‘to show,’ ” said Ursuline sophomore Celja Uebel.
A typical Latin class assignment requires translating stories that can include tales of drinking or romance, with characters often praying to the gods for protection.
For 16-year-old Montgomery sophomore Graham Miller, translating aloud from Virgil’s “Aeneid” was giving him fits. The Latin word for rudder — gubernaculum — had him flummoxed. With encouragement from Lehman, word by word, Miller began to understand the story.
“The rudder torn off by great ... force. By chance, falling head first. I was wearied by the rough seas. No one had ever been so afraid,” he finished, looking up with a beaming smile.
Storytelling is often a tool for Latin teachers. For St. Vincent DePaul teacher John Piazza, who is also co-author of “The Essential Marcus Aurelius,” props are essential.
His former students credit cana and rana, dog and frog stuffed toys, for taking the fear out of Latin.
“Mr. Piazza used different stuffed animals to do different actions, which we would talk about in Latin,” said Scott Walchli who is now attending UC Santa Cruz. “The animals taught us to converse.”
His former St. Vincent classmate, Maddy Williams, who is attending Seattle University, feels “goofing” with Latin paid off.
“When people hear that you studied Latin, they don’t understand why," Said Williams, who got an “A” in Piazza’s class. “I had fun, learned a lot and now I’m incorporating Latin into my daily life.”
Although Piazza is not teaching Latin at St. Vincent this year, he is looking forward to doing so soon. He points out a small tribute to Latin in an outdoor campus walkway where an arc of bricks donated by former students contains names and remembrances.
One stands out: semper ubi sub ubi (always wear under wear).
“I was not a good Latin student,” said Mike Acorne of Petaluma, who graduated from St. Vincent’s in 1963. “But it’s a good segue into Romance languages, which I speak horribly.”
“Latin is the universal language. It’s important,” he said.
For Latin scholar and teacher Piazza, admitting his devotion to the language is easy.
“Latin never goes away. It whispers to us all day long,” he said.
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