Latin

There is a lovely saying 'Latin is a language as dead as dead can
be, first it killed the Romans and now its killing me.' One of the
merits of time is that even if it doesn't heal all wounds, there is no
trace of recollection in my mind of the name of the latin teacher who
tormented my early teens.

Along with German and Italian, it was an optional subject I was forced
to do by my parents. I started a very effective truancy career by
avoiding the later, but Latin...

In the end, there was a solution to my terror of the teacher, coupled
with a complete disinclination to actually learn the subject. Each week
we had one hour of lesson, and one hour of practical. I could sleep
through the former, generally day dreaming of being an evil terrorist
storming the school with an AK47 and putting a literal end to my
misery. Unfortunately other tactics were needed for the
practical.

This is where brilliant friends come in handy, and rudimentary maths
(no calculus needed). Simply, the lesson was 50 minutes long, take away
five minutes for messing about at the beginning. One person in the
class was expected to go through the translation that had been set as
homework. After that, each person had to translate some part of another
text. There were about twenty people in the class, and on average it
took two or three minutes for them to do their part. In other words,
there was never enough time to have to do something twice.

So, what do you do when you have no idea about Latin, when your turn
came around, to translate a passage, on the spot?

It occured to me that the poor sod who did the translation at the
beginning was taking up at least ten minutes of time. If I volunteered
to do that, then there was just forty minutes at worst to survive. All
I needed was someone to translate the exercise for me beforehand, which
thankfully my brilliant friend Rima did willfully.

Every lesson, I volunteered to do the homework exercise, and my turn
never came around to actually have to translate, live, in class. I
never learnt a single word of latin that year, and I was never
caught.

The moral of the story is really how the prodigals always win, and the
rest don't. Kids, never be clever about solving your school related
problems, be antisocial. Your problems will be noticed, and probably
addressed.