Mea Magistra Latina

When I was young, my teachers were always there, always present, always around. This was the case probably because my mother was also a teacher and taught at the schools that I attended. The result of this was that I knew my teachers as people who had lives outside of the classroom, and I believed that they would always be there, because they always were. My respect for teachers, especially high school teachers is immense (having been raised by one and having been one myself and having had a particularly great one as a mentor in my time as a high school teacher). What a thing to realize, but because I’ve always believed my teachers would be there, it’s an interesting portion of my life to realize the impermanence of life for those who have had such an impact on me. I don’t usually do this, but I’d like to write a little bit about my high school Latin teacher. She passed away yesterday. I’m sure that it’s no surprise the impact she had on me: she is one of the many reasons that I do what I do.

Like everyone else who took Latin in high school, I remember little things like the song that we sang to memorize the noun declension endings, the way that some people always break into declining agricola (agricolae, agricolae, agricolam, agricola…) whenever I say that I taught Latin, as though they are trying to prove that this is the thing to be remembered, this arbitrary part of the language. What I want to know, though, is the stories that we remember; what it feels like to read a novel that retells a myth from the woman’s perspective; what it feels like to see a piece of art or read a poem that retells a myth. (It feels like finding a treasure or a secret message.) To me, this is the point of studying Latin. Caroline (I don’t know that I’ve ever called her by her first name – seems so strange when I always called her Magistra Miklosovic) taught me many things, but three lessons in particular have stuck with me. 

1. If I wanted to be a writer, study Classics because that is where stories began. 
2. Latin and Latin stories are everywhere.
3. Marry your best friend. 

These are not even really lessons about Latin as a language. Perhaps that is why they stick out. 

1. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. When I say that I learned how to write in Latin class (and not English class) I mean that she assigned essays that didn’t have to be written in five-paragraphs. She read my essays for her class and for other classes, she read my short stories, and she gave me stories to read that she thought would help me or serve as examples. Her argument that I should study Classics to become a writer was a compelling one, and one that I obviously stuck with. I love tracing stories from then to now, something that she modeled in her teaching. 
2. I started taking Latin in eighth grade, and in that introductory class she read myths out loud to us on Fridays. She read from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Mary Innes’ translation no less (the first woman until this year to translate the entirety of the Metamorphoses into English). On a trip to Italy with her, we saw Bernini’s sculpture of Apollo and Daphne. That moment changed everything for me. When we translated Ovid’s story from Latin, her question at the end was: did Daphne get away (if she becomes a tree that becomes an icon of Apollo)? Although I’d already formulated an idea in my young brain that she didn’t get away, Bernini’s sculpture solidified that answer for me. Later, it helped me to realize that the story is actually about an attempted rape, and while many high-profile translators shove the word “consent” into their translations, and others seem to think that this is one of the greatest love stories of all time, there is nothing consensual about this story, nor is there anything akin to love. How many women have been chased down (literally or metaphorically) by men who just keep pursuing them? Too many to count. How many times have I been chased down by men who just keep pursuing? Too many to count. Her approach to teaching Latin was a rhetorical one; I know that now after I’m ABD in a PhD program in Rhetoric. She situated the language, the stories, their relevance and reception, into our contemporary time, and asked us to look out into the world and see places where they existed from high art to television commercials to novels. Knowing the original language only enhances my relationship to these stories and these realizations, it lets me look at the language and always start from there when I try to interpret them. 
3. Her husband, Michael, was a substitute teacher for our high school for a while. Not only that, but as an older high school student and then college student, I knew them both from dinners at her house. They were so welcoming to me and my mother. She’d been divorced before, and I always really valued women who’d had that experience because that was my mother, too. One of the things that she’d say over and over again was that she’d married her best friend, Michael, and I took that as one of her lessons about life. It wasn’t until I met Jen that I realized I’d been thinking through this message the wrong way. I always thought I should be with someone I’d known since I was young, that this meant that we were friends and knew each other well because of the length of time we’d existed in proximity to one another and that this would be the thing that would make a relationship work. I failed to recognize that what I was actually looking for was someone who could become that person, someone who could become my best friend, not someone that I perceived as already being a friend (but who wasn’t, not really). Jen is that person for me.

I was horribly shy in high school, and Magistra recognized my quietness as a kind of wisdom and thoughtfulness, as observation of the world that I would then do something about or share in my writing. Since I’m being reflective, another teacher, Ms Craig, passed away recently, too. She was a math teacher. I am embarrassingly bad at math. Great teachers have a way of articulating things about their students, character traits that they are often too young, or too in the way, to recognize in themselves. Ms. Craig told my mother that I was a sponge: I listened and soaked things up, and then formulated my own ideas about them. This trait did not help me do any better in math, but it stuck with me, this way of articulating something about myself and the way that my brain works. It seemed to be a quality that she admired in me, and often it’s hard for high schoolers to admire those things in themselves. It takes a great teacher to recognize something about students as valuable, even when it doesn’t improve their skill in the subject they teach.

Magistra gave small gifts to her senior students: journals in which she’d write messages to each of us on the first pages. Recently, while I was helping my mother clean out her house to sell it, I found the journal that she’d given me. I put it in the pile of things I wanted to keep and packed it away with my other journals and notebooks when I got home. I didn’t open it: I assumed that I’d filled it with angsty journal entries during college (and didn’t have the energy to confront those memories). When I saw the first posts on Facebook that she’d gotten sick and was in hospice, I went to my basket of notebooks to pull out that one and look at the message she’d written me. I found that the notebook was empty. Like maybe there was some final message in there somewhere that there is always a new story, always a new journey, always one that, for me, starts with Latin.