during my junior or senior year - i can't recall which - i somehow managed to juggle my schedule such that i was done with classes by 1pm. i was the only one who did this (it required the questionable decision to take biology over the summer), and consequently, i had one to two free hours between the end of my school day and the end of my friends'. my only recollection of how i filled this time was screwing around in novel ways.

like crashing one of berkeley high's latin classes.

students showing up to classes not their own wasn't common, but neither was it unheard of. i, at least, actually attended berkeley high, unlike a friend of mine who once spent a day playing hooky from her own school so she could shadow classes at ours for fun. i don't know how much skepticism she faced from teachers, but she made it through the day without getting kicked out. i guess no schoolteacher complained about over-attendance.

the teacher of the latin class i crashed (on the urging of my buddies who actually took it) sure didn't. i suspect, retrospectively, that my adolescent self got predictably out-played by an actual adult. the teen boy shows up to a class he shouldn't be in, his smug demeanor demanding a response to the implicit question: "what are you gonna do, kick me out?"

the teacher: "what are you gonna do? stay?"

but i'm nothing if not stubborn, so i got one of the readers and sat down, and everyone smirked to each other and ourselves and the whole absurd situation while i listened to them read from the latin book for 50 minutes, which is apparently most of what they did in that class. (there was a joke about how this book was so easy that even i could probably participate, which elicited appropriately sensible chuckles from everyone. the primary benefit of high school latin class is, of course, practicing the social behaviors expected of the caste that sends its children to latin class; any latin education is secondary.)

spending a class period listening to my peers stumble through what was effectively a latin children's book was, in one sense, a waste of time. but it brought important perspective: i saw that my fellow students' rudimentary grasp of the dead language they haltingly aped didn't make the exercise any more "objectively" useful for them than it was for me. high school latin class isn't an elite academy that bootstraps the world's top scholars' intellectual ascendency; it's a bunch of dorks with college application stretch goals. it reinforced the fundamental lesson of berkeley high: there are no rules, only decisions. show up to class or don't, do the exercise or don't, follow the rule or don't. the most important thing is that nobody else gets to dictate what you care about.

and the gag i got out of it was that in the days after my experience as a latin scholar i would troll the "other" latin students with my perfect test record. i have, after all, never failed a latin exam.