Latin’s Anything But Dead : Lively Teaching Helps the Language Resurge in South Bay Schools

Taking Latin is like taking cod-liver oil, right? It’s supposed to be good for you, so you sign up for the course, even though you know it’s going to be awful. The teacher will be a little old lady who never cracks a smile, and she’ll make you do all those horrible conjugations, like Capiam, capies, capiet, capiemus and, uh, whatever comes next.

Then she’ll want you to translate something like Fidem meam obligo vexillo Civitatum. . . . But nobody talks that way anymore. It’s a boring, dead language. So forget it, right?

Not a chance, say Latin teachers and a new generation of students. The language of the ancient Romans is enjoying a dramatic resurgence, they say, in the South Bay and nationwide.

New Teaching Techniques

Among forces boosting the popularity of Latin, they say, are a renewed emphasis on academic excellence in schools, the view that studies of ancient civilizations provide a better understanding of the modern world, and new teaching techniques that make Latin--would you believe it?--fun and exciting.

“A knowledge of Latin is once again the mark of an educated person,” said Latin teacher McNair Maxwell, who has 90 students at the Palos Verdes and Miraleste high schools where she splits her time.

Her Palos Verdes High students proved their academic mettle by winning 11 top honors, including the state championship in the Latin II quiz, at last year’s convention of the California Junior Classical League in Irvine.

The potential lifelong benefit for Latin students, Maxwell said, is a better understanding of their world through studying the ancient civilization on which today’s government, languages, art and literature are based.

Or, as a Latin club song puts it: “Searching for the realms of the golden past, we follow the classics’ truth that lasts.”

For college-bound youngsters--more than 80% of Peninsula students--a knowledge of Latin also has the practical benefit of improving their performance on entrance tests, she said.

The edge comes, Maxwell said, from studying a language that provides the roots for about 60% of English words, a factor that can expand a student’s vocabulary and insights into the meanings of words--and help them figure out test questions.

Marnie Friedman, one of Maxwell’s fourth-year students, said learning Latin requires a lot of dedication. “By comparison, English is easy and simple,” she said. But she said the effort is worth it and as she works on her goal of becoming a doctor, she will find it easier to use Latin-derived terms for prescriptions and medical conditions.

Senior Elsie Chiang, the state Latin club’s parliamentarian, said she likes the elaborate structure of Latin. “French is kind of messy by comparison, and I’m a person who likes order in everything,” said Chiang, who also speaks Mandarin.

Maxwell’s students said they get some kidding from classmates. “Only the ‘brains’ take it,” said Andrew Schuricht, with an amused smile. “At least, that’s what some kids think.”

But some Latin students welcome that certain mysterious, intellectual aura that taking the subject gives them, teachers say. In terms of campus popularity, it is no longer a kiss of death to be known as an academic high-achiever.

As for making the subject more fun, Maxwell and Lura Wallace, the Latin teacher at Gardena High School for 35 years, said the key is mixing studies with socializing and reenactments of Roman scenes--such as banquets with everybody wearing togas.

Next fall, Wallace’s class will sponsor its 26th annual Roman banquet, which is expected to attract about 250 Latin students from the Los Angeles area.

“We try to make everything as authentic as possible,” said Wallace, whose students won first place in the advanced division at last year’s state convention. “Food is served with finger bowls, we drink wine--it’s really punch--and the students dress in Roman clothes that they make themselves.”

Wallace’s students even made a full-size chariot, which is kept in the classroom until it’s rolled out for a banquet or convention. It will be a featured attraction at the Latin clubs’ state convention at San Marino High School next month.

According to the convention agenda, Latin language contests, called certamen, will be mixed with slave auctions, Roman-style parties, Olympics, and Roman music and art competitions.

Wallace, who is widely regarded as the area’s dean of Latin teachers, said the subject went into a rapid decline in the 1960s and ‘70s, when many young people wanted to throw out everything that didn’t seem to connect with the here and now.

From a high of 655,000 Latin students in secondary schools nationwide in 1960, the total dwindled to 150,000 by 1976. During the same period, the number of Latin clubs in California sank from 128 to 33, and many schools stopped offering the subject.

Wallace said she lost nearly half her students but still managed to keep the subject going at Gardena High “with a lot of support from parents and teachers and former students who believe that Latin is an integral part of learning.”

The number of students nationwide is still less than a third of the total in Latin’s glory days, but the chariot is rolling again and the new race is just beginning, Latin enthusiasts believe.

Differences From English

Latin seems difficult to English students because the language is “inflected,” Wallace said. The meaning of a word depends on its ending, not on its place in a sentence. “We’re used to skimming a sentence,” she said. “But you have to look very carefully at each word in Latin.”

Students of Latin have an easier time with the Romance languages--Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and Romanian--because the modern languages grew out of a mix of Latin spoken by Roman conquerors and whatever the natives were speaking, Wallace said.

While English has many Latin roots, she said, its structure remains Anglo-Saxon--that is, the subject tends to come first, followed by the verb.

Wallace said Latin is a “dead” language in the sense that nobody, except some Roman Catholic priests, speaks it anymore, and no babies are learning Latin as their first language.

“But that doesn’t mean the language is dead and buried,” she said. “It’s very much alive in other languages and in the culture we have inherited.”