I Decline

Her name was funny. It made us laugh. She taught Latin. Mrs. Isabel Patten taught Latin. You can’t make stuff like that up. Her name rhymes with the subject she taught. latin I, II, III, and IV. If you started with I, you kept going until you got to IV. You were pretty much stuck with Latin and Mrs. Patten. 

That was all right, because it might have been Latin - for the smart kids - but at least it wasn’t French. That meant putting up with Mrs. Rodney’s horrendously nasal voice, even in the words that had no nasal vowels. The choice was clear: not French.

Her face was rather square, flat on the sides and her chin. Her hair should have had some gray in it, but didn’t. Nobody thought much about that, but it probably wasn’t natural. It had waves that tried to be curls, but didn’t quite make it. There was never any style to it.

Her scowl that was probably meant to be a smile but mostly looked like a grimace that couldn’t be washed off. She wore bright red lipstick that never matched anything she wore, although mostly she wore dull and drab, clothes that were as boxy as her face. Maybe if she’d worn black, the red gash of her mouth would have looked nicer.

Her smell of smoke wasn’t the only one in the school, because other teachers smoked, too, but she had such a cloud of tobacco around her it seemed she rushed out between classes to puff away, then snuffed out the butt five seconds before starting the next class. Even my father, who was a heavy smoker, didn’t smell as much like cigarettes as Mrs. Patten did.

Christmas assembly was her thing. She made everyone learn carols in Latin, French, German, and the languages of exchange students, which most recently had been Spanish and Chinese. It was never clear to us if she knew Spanish or could pronounce it correctly, but she taught the carols to all of us and we never complained. Our Chinese must have been atrocious, certainly with no proper use of tones. Ping eng yay, wan ton yay. Something like that. Parents had the impression their children were fluent in languages their kids had never studied.

The toga banquet she organized carefully, dictating the togas each of the four levels could wear. Slaves were Latin I and could only wear plain white, knee-length garments. We could wear chains if they were discreet. Second year students could wear something long, but not elaborate. Third years could wear a colored toga. Purple was for royalty or upper class, and we snuck in some gold braid. We were starting to feel some real Roman power when we reached that level.

Finally, those in fourth year Latin could dress in almost any attire as long as it looked ancient and Roman. I opted for Aurora, goddess of the dawn, and had three swirls of cloth around me, nicely anchored by a mother who was skilled with a sewing machine. The swirls were meant to look like the sky with clouds and were apricot, dark blue, and light blue, like the colors that appear when the sun comes up. 

Memory has not preserved the toga banquet fare, beyond the essential grapes. Maybe there was pizza, which back then and in a small town was not at all like you get today. No idea what beverages were served, since wine was not possible. Maybe the standard substitute of grape juice was the choice, like in communion on Sundays.

Note: Nobody even remotely got the impression that the banquet was like a big pajama party sleep over involving boys and girls. General Patten was there to chaperone and script every participant. There were plays about something related to our classes, but it was really all about the togas.

Junior Classical League had such a boring yet sophisticated name. It was a big deal, but probably it has crumbled like a lot of ancient ruins with the disappearance of classical languages from high school. If it still exists, its constitution says that its mission is "to encourage an interest in and an appreciation of the language, literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome and to impart an understanding of the debt of our own culture to that of classical antiquity." 

That is a direct quote. Nowadays, many people can’t find Greece OR Rome on a map and couldn’t care less. That’s kind of sad, like it’s sad that children used to learn cursive in second grade but now schools don’t have time to teach it OR grammar. We, though, could find our way through every main street in Rome and locate the important piazzas. 

We were being prepared, Mrs. Patten said, for when we went there one day. We shook our heads at the thought. Years later, no longer shaking my head, I thanked Mrs. Patten for being able to find my way around the city without a GPS. I noted, though, that our Latin classes had not included the fact that Rome was full of cats. Athens, too, although we never made maps of the Greek city.

Mythology was like a collection of short stories, although we weren’t all thrilled at having to learn both the Greek and the Roman name for each deity. There must have been a reason, though. I often toyed with the idea of naming a pet after Athena or Minerva, Diana or Artemis. Interestingly enough, when I took Mythology in college, I already knew it all. Mrs. Patten had made sure of it.

If you took Latin, you knew you’d do a lot of translating texts, although the texts were extremely boring. On the other hand, blocking was fun. I don’t know if blocking is the term all Latin teachers used, but I do know the college professors of Latin never used it. I adored writing on the pages, underlining main verbs twice and dependent verbs once, putting brackets around ut clauses, things like that.

I am certain that drawing over the sentences helped fuel my passion for word and image. I can see no other source of it. Of course, it is possible that attraction began in eighth grade English when Mrs. Amelia Brady taught us how to diagram sentences. You didn’t get out of school back then without a good command of grammar as well as the ability to write cursive.

Daily verbs and declensions were easy. Again, we already knew things from eighth grade English; in Latin we learned about declensions. Conjugations and declensions. Still two of my loves. Did I say I loved the homework Mrs. Patten gave us? Five verbs a night, in every tense, person, and mood? Now I wonder if she ever looked at them, but no matter. A short while later I could see I was set up fine to learn languages I could actually speak. How did that happen?

Mrs. Patten made us do it. We repeated and repeated. Teachers can’t do that nowadays - it’s student abuse. One must teach with smiles and games, and without homework. Learning must be fun, not work, and easy, not hard. We didn’t know that was coming for the classes following us.

The discipline part can’t be stressed enough. Latin was, after all, the hardest course in the whole school, and that included Physics. I wouldn’t know, because after Chemistry with a certain teacher who resembled Alfred Hitchcock and liked the girl students too much even if they got bad grades came Physics with that same teacher. Not for me.

Discipline is an odd thing: it appears to be something that school teachers no longer have authority over in schools. If the employees are overly strict, they may face legal charges, lose their employment, or be punished in some other way. Not the case with Mrs. Patten, teacher of Latin. She was blunt and open. She scolded and sometimes ridiculed. She said to me, who had been first in class since kindergarten, 

“Your parents would be ashamed of you, Jenny June. Such a low grade.”

In front of the entire class, yes. Mentioned my parents by their first and last names. A bad grade was my shame, though, my fault. That isn’t allowed nowadays, probably. Back then, I knew I had to fix it. I had a reputation to uphold. 

Which I did. The next quarter saw a thirty point improvement. (We used a system based on a hundred points. Honor Roll was 93 or higher.) My parents weren’t disgraced any longer by their lazy daughter. She had realized the error of her ways and decided she had to work harder to avoid a second public pillorying.

At this point you probably have a good sense of Mrs. Patten and her Latin classes. Now that I think about it, there was a lot going on there besides actually translating the language. I loved it all, though, but wondered why, for years. Finally, I figured it out.

All Mrs. Patten did was teach what she loved, and she insisted - expected, demanded - we love it, too. She gave a lot of homework and tests. She frowned especially hard when we forgot the name of a god or goddess. She demanded attendance at Junior Classical League banquets like the ones held in Rome, New York. I never thought how hard she must have worked to herd us all there.

Mrs. Patten was unconventional because she cut nobody any slack and never refrained from evaluating students publicly. She had duds and gems in her classes, and some average brains. It doesn’t matter which of those groups I was in, because I took the “your parents would be ashamed of you” to heart. When I did that, everything else in my life fell into place. Now the blocky face and smoky scent have faded in comparison to the conjugations and declensions that have helped me get through life, kept me on an even keel, provided a salary.

I would be nothing at all if it weren’t for nominative genitive dative accusative ablative vocative locative. Cases, all beautiful. Although maybe that should be locative vocative? Nothing either without first second third fourth (few of those) fifth. Declensions, also beautiful. Manageable. Predictable. First second third declensions - all with delectable subjunctives. Seriously appealing, and doable. Words in daily verb assignments drawn over an entire page, front and back. Art.

There are no teachers anymore like my Latin teacher. They won’t allow them. They hardly ever allow Latin anymore, either. More useless than cursive. But they can’t take mine away from me.