Jio Kim: Questions in the Units of the Unknown

Jio Kim has a phrase she made up herself: she likes, she says, to question things in the units of the unknown. She offers it almost as an aside, but it is a genuinely accurate description of what studying Latin has actually trained her to do.

She arrived at Emerson Latin a year and a half ago with no Latin at all. Ask her what changed and she does not point first to a score, though she has those too; she points to a moment during her own preparation for the AP Latin exam, when she sat down with an unfamiliar passage and worked through it entirely alone, without a class or a teacher beside her, and found that she could. That was the moment, she says, she actually believed the training had taken.

Her favorite line in Latin comes from the Aeneid: mens agitat molem, mind moves matter. She reads it as a kind of argument for why Latin still matters at all: some things cannot be proven or measured, only described, and Latin, more than most languages she has encountered, seems built for exactly that work. It is not a small thing for a seventeen-year-old to have arrived at her own reading of Vergil, argued in her own words, and meant it.

Jio now captains her school's Latin Varsity League team, serves as president of her school's Latin Club, and leads a committee within it besides. She came to Emerson Latin through Intensive Latin, moved through Oxford Latin, and sat for the AP Latin exam this year, results still pending. Whatever the score turns out to be, the habit she actually built is the one she named herself: to take an unfamiliar thing and question it, patiently, in units small enough to work with.