Why School Children Everywhere Should Study Latin

Okay, sidebar.

I just saw a blog entitled "Propranolol vs. Atenolol."

This frightens me because a) who the hell devotes an entire blog to dueling beta-blockers and b) I was just writing a nurse friend of my today and pooh-poohing atenolol as the most useless beta blocker ever to be prescribed IVP (IV push).

Alright.

So for the record: I am still sick, skinny, and now, jobless, having begged off the one good nursing job I've had in a year because I was too damn ill to go back and work backbreaking back-to-back twelve hour hospital shifts.

I'm about two steps from the poorhouse, but let's not think about that now! Let's think about Latin!

There are several reasons for this strategy.

As a way of introduction: it is depressing to think about how little an American dollar actually stretches these days, and it's especially sad when suddenly these stupid hospital bills come rolling in like some insidious wave of the Bubonic Plague (incidentally, I love how the bills claim, in bold letters: "This is not a bill! It is a statement!" BALONEY. What this really means is "This is a statement. Of your bill." Friggin' wolves in sheeps' clothing! It is too a bill, just a bill in disguise. Like they think I can't deconstruct their subversive but none-too-clever crackpot scheme to defraud the working poor).

Second, when depressed, the next logical step for a confirmed academic geek like myself is to pull out old textbooks and start reciting conjugations in Latin and stem endings (-o or -m, -s, -t, -mus, -tis and -nt!). There's nothing more to warm the cockles of an academic geek's shriveled up old heart than to read those spiffy Wheelock English-to-Latin sentences that somehow always seem to involve girls saving poets from bad fates or daughters of Rome with sound character and true virtue laboring to help the state, or, in later chapters, endless references to Cicero's Cataline oratories, with swords and flames etc, or Caesar's rather boring and stilted reminscences about Gaul.

(Laugh, but trust me, my disquiet at my financial situation was such that it was either that or memorize STEMI and nonSTEMI ACLS algorithms, and don't think it didn't occur to me to dig out my 2005 ACLS pocket guidebook. Because I did. And lo, I read them while eating my oatmeal this morning. And lo, someone should shoot me now and put me out of my misery, because my God, this kind of pedantry should be illegal, child!)

Also, when depressed, it helps to think there was once a time when even if you mistranslated miles, militis, m. solidier, for milia, milium n., pl., thousands, you weren't going to kill someone because you gave them a huge dose of some vasoactive drug.

And it's also helpful to remember, when feeling like a right royal screw up, that you haven't actually killed any one on the job yet, and there are even jobs out there where you'd virtually never have to even contrive a situation where you could possibly fuck up badly enough to cause any one else permanent lasting damage, death or dismemberment. (I thought about this while shopping at Publix, the local supermarket, while I bought cooking staples like olive oil--and pondered philosophically what indeed it means to be "extra virgin.")

I used to think teaching would be one of those nice kinds of job, where you could impart your vast (or in my case, pithy) repository of knowledge and expertise on the new generation and every one would think you were doing this wonderful, altruistic thing with the added benefit that it remains extremely difficult to think of--let alone conjure-- a situation where discussing Foucaultian discours during class time could kill someone!

So what did I do? Become a nurse, where every so often they foist a poor student on you, so in addition to trying to juggle a patient assignment, you also have to shepard some poor twenty-year-old-deer-caught-in-headlights-young-thing through your shift, which means explaining why you just took fifty unauthorized shortcuts to get your meds passed and assessments done before attending rounds, bitch unprofessionally at pharmacy for not getting med orders right, throw a tantrum at the tray passers who think it's a nurse's scope of practice to set up breakfast trays, and how then smile apologetically and insist in a very half-assed way that the student should totally ignore the nurse behind the sterile field curtain and do it the right way, of course.

The scary thing about me taking on a nursing student (apart from the fact that staff nurses don't actually get paid extra to teach students) is that ummmm dude, I was just a student a year ago myself. Like, hello brilliant educational system!! I don't know what the hell I'm doing myself most days, and uh, you think I'm qualified to teach the next generation of burnt-out RNs?

Apparently the nursing shortage is such that they really could care less.

Which of course brings us a long way from Latin.

Or does it?

Because really, the whole point of diversion is to think about something entirely different from reality, and the study of Latin, oddly enough, represents to me some kind of ideal academic subject, the kind which is only mastered through rigorous and continual application of backside to chair. My favorite kind, in other words.

I also liked it because it wasn't French, at which I failed miserably (because anything that has an actual real world application is something at which I am destined to underachieve, as evidenced by my ruthlessly pointless academic degrees, religion and theology, of which people were always saying--somewhat rudely, if pointedly--"What are you going to do with that?!")

But Latin. Ah. There's a language no one speaks any more! So of course, it turned out I had much more of an aptitude for a dead language than a living one, just as I suspect if sitting in a room all day thinking about how to apply critical theory to the nursing profession was a real job description, I'd actually be employed right now.

I also just happened to like the language itself, though. So pleasantly rigorously structured, almost mathematical in a way (and math, being useful, is of course one more thing I couldn't shine at if my sorry ass life depended on it). All kinds of nice rules to follow, and declining nouns is a really fabulous way to spend an entire weekend if you just so happen to be twenty-five and stuck in a retirement town where everything closes after 5p.m.

I've always thought I would have been a much happier, perhaps less financially woe-begone person if I had been just a little bit smarter or a whole lot dumber, but that is another subject for another day.

Meanwhile I'd better stamp out my vocational ADD in a big hurry if I want to pay my hospital bills, and you know, not end up a homeless urchin giving Latin lessons to gang bangers on streetcorners.