Every high school has that one class. The one that makes you stare at the clock like it personally offended you. For me, in the Catholic high school I attended, the class I suffered through each week was Latin.
Yes, Latin. A language so dayum dead that it makes disco look lively.
While other classmates were learning Spanish so they could actually order food on vacation or French so they could pretend to be cultured in college, I was memorizing declensions for a civilization that collapsed before indoor plumbing was cool. “Puella ad puteum ambulavit” echoed through my teenage brain while I tried to figure out how any of this would help me survive algebra, let alone adulthood. Know what? It did not. Not a microscopic bit!
There is something deeply absurd about spending what feels like endless time conjugating verbs no one has spoken conversationally since togas were everyday wear. I never once found myself in a real-life emergency thinking, “If only I could translate Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars, I’d know what to do.” Instead, I learned how to diagram sentences that felt like linguistic archaeology. You didn’t speak Latin, you excavated it.
The sales pitch from the Sisters of Charity who oversaw the class with absolute, and stern, authority was always the same: “It helps with vocabulary.”, “It’s the root of Romance languages.”, “It’s great for SAT scores.” Yeah, right, Sister Scholastica. I remember wanting to advise her that reading books helped with vocabulary and that reading a current book helped with Romance languages. And the SAT debacle? That test changed formats more times than a politician’s promise.
Did I mention suffering? Let me share that my class had the energy of a museum gift shop. Educational, technically impressive, and completely detached from the urgency of teenage life. While the world was sprinting toward boys, dances, hiking up the skirts on our school uniforms as soon as the bell rang, we were forcefully (and carefully) translating sentences about farmers praising the gods for good harvests. Want to know something else? Not once has any farmer asked me for help in Latin. Not one damn time!
And yet, here it comes, the part I despise admitting. Latin wasn’t entirely useless. It did teach discipline because Latin, itself, is structure. Endings matter and word order is absolute chaos unless you fully understand the system beneath it. Latin forces your brain to slow down and analyze; you learn that meaning hides in all the small details where one letter can change everything.
Latin also taught patience in that translations cannot be rushed. I recall sitting in a state of confusion, stumbling and wrestling with fragments of the language until they made sense. Sometimes it all flowed, other times, an exercise in futility. In a strange way, there is almost something powerful about that.
When it came to practical life skills, Latin was in between learning to file taxes and square dancing in gym class. Would I choose it again, knowing what I know at this point in my life? Hell no. Teenage me could have used financial literacy instead of memorizing irregular verbs from a language that retired (no died) centuries ago.
Adulthood has a way of softening your critical memories. The Latin translations are gone and I could not decline a noun if you paid me, so please don’t ask. I do remember the painful and quiet focus on those classes, how they dragged on and on and the strange satisfaction I felt when something finally clicked.
Yes, Latin may be very dead, but the thinking it encouraged isn’t. Was it the most useless class I took? Objectively, yes. Secretly, it did more than I realized at the time, all high school pissing and moaning aside, it wasn’t really about the subject at all.
I’ll just bet that somewhere, a toga flutters approvingly in the breeze of my memories. All these years later, this “useless” class pays a denarius or two in the form of my sarcasm. Amo, Amas, Amat!
From the Writer’s Workshop: What was the most useless class you took? Tell us about it.
