A Big Red "F": A Bad Start To High School

    After my mother’s death, my sisters and brothers cleaned out the house where she had lived and sent me some of the things that related to me.  Among those things were some of my old report cards from both elementary and high school that my mother had saved.  While looking through them this morning, I came across the one above from my first year of high school.  It was a reminder of the the difficult time I had in my Freshman year.

    In elementary school, my grades had always been okay, average or above.  I was not a “straight A” student, but I did okay.  When I was about to enter high school, I was put in the “university lane” which determined which classes I should take.  Among those classes was Latin.  I had never taken any language classes before, and I was interested in Roman history, and knew that a lot of English words were based on Latin words, so I was somewhat eager to learn Latin.

    That eagerness didn’t last very long, once I had gotten into class.  I was almost immediately over my head.  The problem was the grammar.  I must not have gotten much specific grammar in my elementary classes, because suddenly Mr. Blandford, the Latin teacher, was talking about predicate nominatives and how to deal with them in Latin, and I had never even ever heard of a predicate nominative before.  

    I was further hampered in Latin class because I was always so tired.  The year I entered high school, the school suffered from a huge student population, and to deal with it, they began starting having some classes start at 7:00.  Unfortunately for me, that was when my Latin class was.  I was just not very wide awake and ready for scholarly pursuits at that time of day.  Studies have shown that growing teens just don’t function well early in the morning.

    So, I flunked Latin, receiving a big red “F”.  It was humiliating to me to be a failure, but fortunately, Latin was the only class I took in high school that gave me such problems.

    Flunking Latin was such a huge deal when it happened, and seemed at the time, that my whole life would be ruined by it, but looking back, I see it was just a insignificant bump on the road, and it really mean’t nothing to my life.

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