2/28/25 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott
Photo Caption: Our Lady of Peace Children's Choir
Dear Our Lady of Peace Family,
Arriving at St. Charles in the fall of 1970 as a freshman, Latin was introduced to me on the very first day of school in Room 301 by Father, now Monsignor, Bill Dunn, who taught Latin I to freshmen. Father Dunn taught with a low monotone voice that seemed to fit the Latin drills that were the beginning of our immersion into the language. “O or m, s, t, mus, tis, nt.” I can still hear him urging us on like monks in the monastery. “puella, puella, puellae, puellae, puellam, puella, puellae, puellae, puellarum, puellis, puellas, puellis.” Even when he cracked a joke or corrected a student, it sounded like a Latin drill as his voice would lower and he would peer atop his glasses and say,
“Eyes on the page, Mr. Silcott, not out the window. We are reciting Latin, not bird watching.” The first word we learned in Latin was agricola, first declension, masculine, meaning “farmer.” In order to keep up with Latin at St. Charles, you had to attend to it daily, as regular as brushing your teeth, or you would fall behind quickly. Memorization, pop quizzes, endless translation from Latin to English and English to Latin all were part of my education. Although my baseball team at the time, the Baltimore Orioles, were in the World Series in 1970 (and beat the Reds in 5 games under the mighty defense of Brooks Robinson), I had little time to attend to baseball games as my Latin homework was with me always.
St. Charles only required you to sit through two years of Latin class, but I elected to ride out my high school career with four years, all with Father Dunn in Room 301. From Agricola vocat puellam through the Gallic wars of Julius Caesar - Veni, Vidi, Vici, to the musins of Cicero, I learned to parse long Latin passages, sometimes on my own, sometimes with the help of a superior Latin student, Jim Vonau, and many times with the aid of a pony, which was the name of English translations of Latin verse, illegal at St. Charles but widely utilized. When I graduated in 1974, I thought I was done with Latin, but found quickly that Latin was not done with me.
In college I continued to find myself doing Latin, this time as a tutor. Many a bright student starts out with hopeful ambition at St. Charles and finds himself doing well except for his Latin. And so the phone calls began; from my parents’ friends, from neighbors, from a cousin of an ex-girlfriend. “You took Latin. Can you help?” And so I went to homes and drilled them just as Father Dunn had taught me, trying most of all to convince them that Latin was a discipline much like exercise. Do it daily, do it often and you will succeed. Pick it up occasionally and you will fail.
When I was hired at Bishop Watterson in the fall of 1979, it was to teach English. Two days before the beginning of the school year in 1980, John Durant, the principal, came to me at the opening faculty meeting and said, “You went to St. Charles. You are going to be my new first year Latin teacher.” It seems that one of the Dominican sisters who taught Latin had retired suddenly when her driving privileges were taken away. And so, for eight years I taught, along with my English classes, two sections of Latin I, handing my students off, if they made it that far, to Sister Francis Marie, who taught the upper Latin sections. The drills of syntax and translation that I had learned myself I tried my best to pass on to my students. Even today, I occasionally run into a former Latin student who doesn’t begin his conversation with “Hello,” but by citing the six cases of puella or the three persons, singular and plural, of amo.
When you teach something, you grow to love it and that is what happened with Latin and me. Unlike life, Latin is orderly and organized. While the textbooks have changed, the language has not. There are still six cases of Latin nouns and the only controversy in Latin is whether to use classical or Church pronunciation. When I look at the complexity of a sentence in English, I use Latin grammar to analyze it. When I see an unfamiliar word in a book I am reading, I frequently can guess its meaning because of its connection to its Latin roots. And as Latin has crept back into Mass from time to time, I am familiar with the words and their meaning.
Now I teach Latin to about half of our middle school students. Some struggle with the vocabulary, others with the endings of nouns and verbs, and, for a few, it is English grammar that is the issue. But there is still value to it, whether they know it now or not. Father Dunn once said, “If you can master Latin, you can master life. “
“Semper ad Meliora.”
Jim Silcott
