Looking back on it I really should have taken Spanish, I could have actually used that and surely it must be easier than Latin. I guess I took Latin because it seemed like something a pretentious English major would know, grounding in the Classics. The first semester was frightening, I had been out of college for years and the course was a lot tougher than what I expected. Still I slogged through, mostly with mnemonics and lucky guesses. I managed a B+ but I was still only halfway through my language requirements. I couldn't imagine sitting through another M-W-F semester of Latin Power Points and quizzes, when I saw there was an online offering I jumped at it!
I had never taken an online course before and for some reason I imagined it would be this sort of video chat thing where I would watch a teacher online and chime in with the headset I was told to buy. What it turned out to be was a blackboard set up with notes, homework assignments and quizzes. You might think such a course would be easy, after all you could cheat right? Well, aside from the honor system the Professor played a few head games on us, boasting how every semester he caught students cheating and brought them before the Undergrad Dean for I don’t know, excommunication or something awful. A classmate claimed that the Professor had a database of words and rules he had taught us and anything outside of his canon would be considered cheating. To take quizzes we were required to use this special "computer lock down" software that prevented us from opening up anything besides the testing window.
All of this really started to stress me out. The first week I scored a 100 on the quiz, would he accuse me of cheating? Should I dumb it down? The worst part was that quizzes weren't quizzes at all, at least not in the sense that a quiz is something you do for the first half hour of class and it's less than twenty questions long. Latin II quizzes were what I would call final exam length and there was one every week except when we had actual midterms and finals which were truly massive. We were given two hours to complete our quizzes and I never finished with more than a few minutes to spare. Sitting in front of my computer with a kitchen timer ticking, it was sheer terror. Still I was getting good at the game, keeping my test average in the upper eighties and nailing the homework. His homework policy was strictly punitive, you earned nothing for doing your homework instead you lost points for not doing it or doing it poorly.
The day of the final exam I was a wreck mentally. I had studied like mad, reviewing every sentence we had ever worked with, trying to psych out his patterns. I ritualistically cleaned my computer desk and cleared the area of distractions. I had my coffee thermos, kleenex, pencils, scratch paper and two bags of sour patch kids (I would eat one for every question I answered, I know I'm weird). I did some stretches, calculated when to take a bathroom break, turned off my phone and began my three-hour odyssey. I elected to tackle the difficult sentence translations first, figuring I could sprint through the multiple choice section if I had to. I stumbled on few missing nouns right out of the gate and struggled to meet my time goals. Halfway through I knocked over the thermos creating a big coffee puddle that I couldn't stop to mop up. Everything was falling into place but I needed to get some extra credit questions done. The Professor had offered a very generous deal; if our final exam was a higher score than our midterm he would make that our exam average. I knew my best hope lay in picking up some extra credit to counter the disappointing score I had made on the midterm.
I had only ten minutes to translate three sentences, not nearly enough time but like a punch drunk fighter I kept plugging. I lined up my verbs to mine them for person and tense and then slotted the nouns in, then something suddenly engaged in my brain, awakening a part of my database that heretofore had been asleep. The sentences were directly lifted from the Aeneid, literature over Latin! I translated them almost entirely on the memory of the story and dammit it worked! I won the Trojan War! With 30 seconds on the clock I hit submit and after a nail biting weekend I found out I had made a B+ in the course. I must admit the Latin I learned is fading away but I will never forget my online course and the epic battle of Troy.
I had never taken an online course before and for some reason I imagined it would be this sort of video chat thing where I would watch a teacher online and chime in with the headset I was told to buy. What it turned out to be was a blackboard set up with notes, homework assignments and quizzes. You might think such a course would be easy, after all you could cheat right? Well, aside from the honor system the Professor played a few head games on us, boasting how every semester he caught students cheating and brought them before the Undergrad Dean for I don’t know, excommunication or something awful. A classmate claimed that the Professor had a database of words and rules he had taught us and anything outside of his canon would be considered cheating. To take quizzes we were required to use this special "computer lock down" software that prevented us from opening up anything besides the testing window.
All of this really started to stress me out. The first week I scored a 100 on the quiz, would he accuse me of cheating? Should I dumb it down? The worst part was that quizzes weren't quizzes at all, at least not in the sense that a quiz is something you do for the first half hour of class and it's less than twenty questions long. Latin II quizzes were what I would call final exam length and there was one every week except when we had actual midterms and finals which were truly massive. We were given two hours to complete our quizzes and I never finished with more than a few minutes to spare. Sitting in front of my computer with a kitchen timer ticking, it was sheer terror. Still I was getting good at the game, keeping my test average in the upper eighties and nailing the homework. His homework policy was strictly punitive, you earned nothing for doing your homework instead you lost points for not doing it or doing it poorly.
The day of the final exam I was a wreck mentally. I had studied like mad, reviewing every sentence we had ever worked with, trying to psych out his patterns. I ritualistically cleaned my computer desk and cleared the area of distractions. I had my coffee thermos, kleenex, pencils, scratch paper and two bags of sour patch kids (I would eat one for every question I answered, I know I'm weird). I did some stretches, calculated when to take a bathroom break, turned off my phone and began my three-hour odyssey. I elected to tackle the difficult sentence translations first, figuring I could sprint through the multiple choice section if I had to. I stumbled on few missing nouns right out of the gate and struggled to meet my time goals. Halfway through I knocked over the thermos creating a big coffee puddle that I couldn't stop to mop up. Everything was falling into place but I needed to get some extra credit questions done. The Professor had offered a very generous deal; if our final exam was a higher score than our midterm he would make that our exam average. I knew my best hope lay in picking up some extra credit to counter the disappointing score I had made on the midterm.
I had only ten minutes to translate three sentences, not nearly enough time but like a punch drunk fighter I kept plugging. I lined up my verbs to mine them for person and tense and then slotted the nouns in, then something suddenly engaged in my brain, awakening a part of my database that heretofore had been asleep. The sentences were directly lifted from the Aeneid, literature over Latin! I translated them almost entirely on the memory of the story and dammit it worked! I won the Trojan War! With 30 seconds on the clock I hit submit and after a nail biting weekend I found out I had made a B+ in the course. I must admit the Latin I learned is fading away but I will never forget my online course and the epic battle of Troy.
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