It was the summer before my eighth grade year, and I had anxiously been waiting for my new class schedule. I was begging and pleading to God that I did not get placed into one of three classes: Earth Science, Latin, or Algebra because they were all "high school" clases. I received the letter in the mail, and what do you know -- I was placed in not one but all three of them. My mom encouraged me not to take them, but I had always liked a challenge. Out of all of them, Latin petrified me the most.
I hated every English class I had, so I did not have any idea how in the world my middle school thought I was competent enough to take a foreign language earlier than the other students. I did not even know the teacher, and she intimidated me a little. On my first day of school, Latin was my first class of the day. I was terrified. Hands shaking, armpits sweating, and pencil tapping, I wanted the day to be over and it had just began. Mrs. Cornell-Cash walked in the room, but she told us instantly to call her Frau because she was a German teacher.
As the class went on throughout the year I had no clue what was going on. I heard the words: conjugation, masculine, feminine, and neuture all year long and did not have an idea why any of those words were relevant. I can still remember Frau drilling conjugations into our brain, and then we would all forget them by the time the test rolled around. Latin was one those classes where I did not understand how I was passing but I was. When freshman year started, I gave up on Latin. I could not take it anymore because I did not understand why conjugations were so important and what made a word feminine or not. I avoided Frau for a week, but finally I had to come to terms and admit to her that I just did not like Latin.
Looking back almost five years ago, if there are two words I could say to Frau over and over and over again it would be, thank you. Thank you for believing in me in your class when I didn’t believe in myself. It was hard for me learning a new language, and it was so different to me. What I did not know was that Latin was the foundation for my love of foreign languages. My sophmore year of high school Spanish was a breeze. A light bulb went off in my head and I realized why conjugations were so important and that gender mattered in sentence structure. If it was not for Frau and my eighth grade year of Latin, Spanish would not have been fun for me.
Thank you for believing in my ability to learn a language after I dropped your class. Although it was a shock to her when I did, she still encouraged me to pursue with Spanish. Senior year, sitting in her classroom and comparing stories on how much we loved foreign languages will always be a cherished memory of my high school career. Now as a college student, taking more Spanish classes I constantly think back to the times I spent with Frau, and how Latin opened doors for me.
