On Sat, 21 Sep 2019 10:30:13 +0100, "NY" wrote:

"rbowman" wrote in message
...
On 09/20/2019 08:32 AM, Ralph Mowery wrote:
I don't know how it is now, but 50 years ago the high school had 2 main
devisions. One for those that plan on going to college and one for
those that did not . The college prep course had the higher math like
algebra and geometry, where the other courses just had what was called
general math. I assume that many other courses were similar.

Mine had college entrance kids and the business/shop kids. For college
entrance you took 2 years of Latin, 2 years of either German or French,
and more STEM subjects. The business kids took Spanish and typing.

All in all Spanish and typing would have been a lot handier in my life...

Yes, it is frustrating that you get "forced" into doing certain combinations
of subjects because you are deemed to be more or less clever.

At my school there were two classes in each year. The clever children (I was
supposedly one of those!) had to do Latin and German; the less clever ones
did Biology and Ancient History.

I wanted to do Biology and German, but that combination was "not allowed"; I
pleaded my case that these were the subjects that were probably more useful
to me, and lack of knowledge of Biology would preclude me from any career
that needed it. The headmaster said I presented my case very convincingly to
him - but not convincingly enough to make an exception to the rule.

I found Latin to be an exceptionally difficult language - mainly because I
could never work out which words in a sentence were the nouns, the
adjectives, the adverbs and the verbs. French and German were much easier to
learn. I think the reason is that both these have "little words" (articles
like "a" and "the", pronouns like "he", and a reasonably logical word order
in which adjectives and adverbs usually go next to the noun or verb that
they are qualifying, and the article and pronoun tend to say "the next word
is a noun or a verb respectively". The capital letter on German nouns is a
big giveaway too! Prepositions ("to", "from") are distinct words.

But Latin has none of those. Everything is communicated in word endings
alone, and you need to remember a lot of permutations, some of which are
reused between different parts of speech. That "Romani eunt domus" speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdqXT9k-050 in "Life of Brian" got it
absolutely right. I hadn't realised how much with a foreign language I
depend on the "little words" as a sort of crutch. Word order seems to make a
*virtue* out of putting the adjective as far away from its noun as possible,
ideally next to another unrelated noun (the dreaded "chi-rhoic" construction
that was favoured in Latin poetry - it was seen as "clever" and "educated"
and "elegant").


So when I left that school (my dad changed jobs so we moved to another part
of the country) I had to continue with Latin instead of Biology. The new
school had no hangup about me doing Biology - Latin and Biology were
timetabled at the same time, as true alternatives. But I'd missed too many
years of grounding to be able to pick it up in the fourth form - ie only one
school year before I'd have taken the O level exam in it. So I was stuck
with Latin.

Latin would be very useful if it was taught as a derivation of English
words - "Latin for genealogists", "Latin for historians reading old
documents" etc. But Latin as a grammatical language is dire.


I'd like to have had the "choice" as to whether or not I did Biology at A
level, and the choice as to whether I studied a subject at university that
needed knowledge of it. I may well have chosen not to - but a choice would
have been nice ;-)

At my high school we could take anything we wanted and you got to
graduate as soon as you punched all of the boxes required for that
type of diploma. I ended up taking two years of latin because the
teacher made it interesting. We read Gallic Wars as a war/political
novel with context thrown in by the teacher who also taught ancient
history. The two classes blended together. Second year latin was
mostly reading Cicero. It was an easy way to punch the language and
history tickets. We did learn a lot about the Romans and life in the
Roman army.