Victoria Park's Familiar Shore

Victoria Park was in Year 6 when she first sat down to learn Latin, and she has been learning it, without interruption, for six or seven years since: long enough, she says, that asking what she knew before Emerson Latin is a bit like asking what she knew of the world before she was born into it. She is now in Year 11, a year from graduating, and Latin has run underneath nearly the entire span of her adolescence so far.

She describes her own relationship to the language in a single sentence worth repeating in full: however many seas I cross, Latin shall always be the familiar shore on which I come to rest. It is an unusually accomplished thing for a student to have written, and it is also, on its own terms, simply true of her: across acting, music, mathematics competitions, a self-founded project digitizing historical documents, including records of enslaved people, and a schedule of leadership roles long enough to fill a resume twice over, Latin is the one thread that has run underneath all of it, the entire time.

Ask her about a specific breakthrough and she does not reach first for a competition result, though she has dozens. She reaches instead for a recent lesson in which she and her teacher read one of Ovid's Fasti together, on Arion and the dolphin, and found herself genuinely absorbed in the argument the poem was making, past the level of translation and into the level of thought. She mentions, too, coming around on Vergil, whom she once found difficult and not to her taste, until a particular passage on the nature of Rumour convinced her she had judged him too quickly.

What she values most, by her own account, is not any of this. It is the fact that after six or seven years, the instruction still feels personal: that someone has taken the time to understand how she specifically learns, where she is strong, where she needs to be pushed, and has kept adjusting to that understanding across the whole span of her education so far. That is a considerable thing to say about a subject that began, for her, as an accusative case she did not yet understand.