Counting Backward

In the eighth grade, I won a Latin contest by counting backward.

It happened at the minor seminary where I spent my school years, a place where Latin was less a subject than the weather. Almost every trimester there was a certamen: a contest of quick questions and quicker eliminations. That year, as an eighth grader, I found myself among the last three still standing, alongside the best high school Latinists in the house.

The final three questions were all dates. We were given a date the way we say it now, “June 10th,” and asked to give it the way a Roman would. This is harder than it sounds. A Roman did not count forward from the first of the month. He counted backward, toward three fixed days: the Kalends, the Nones, and the Ides. So June 10th is not “the tenth” of anything. It is ante diem quartum Idus Iunias: the fourth day before the Ides of June, counting both ends, as the Romans did.

I had practiced exactly that. I moved into first place, and a few rounds later the contest was over. My eighth-grade classmates were happy for me, and that, more than the prize, is what I remember.

That contest is the reason every one of my classes begins with one.

What the certamen is

For ten to fifteen minutes at the start of each class, I ask questions quickly, on the homework and on the day’s main point of grammar: a declension, a use of a case, a subjunctive clause. The students answer quickly too. The strongest performers earn credit toward their oral performance grade.

The questions are built the way questions are built at real Latin contests. Many of my students will sit those contests during the year and over the summer, and by then the format feels familiar rather than frightening.

Why at the start

In the seminary, the certamen came at the end of class. I moved it to the beginning, and I have never regretted it.

A contest at the end of a lesson tests what was taught. A contest at the start changes how the lesson is received. Students arrive awake, and they stay on their toes. Because they know they will be asked to answer quickly, they prepare more fully before class, which no amount of reminding can achieve. And a mind that has just answered a handful of quick questions is more open, clearer, and more alert for the rest of the hour.

There is a less obvious benefit too. Speed in Latin is not a trick. A student who can decline a noun without hesitating has stopped translating the grammar and started seeing it. Quickness is what fluency looks like from the outside.

I still think of that contest in the eighth grade, and less because I won than because of what it taught me: that knowing something and knowing it quickly are different, and that the second is learned by practice, in good company, with something gently at stake.

That is what I try to give my students at the start of every class. And, from time to time, a date to count backward.