Following the AP Latin exam, the class of six was faced with a conundrum: what to do with the empty last two weeks? AP Environmental Science fills the last few weeks with small art projects; AP Spanish and AP Calculus film parody-themed videos, both to culminate the class and have a few laughs. There is an artistic thread, a welcome respite from a semester’s worth of hard studying.
For AP Latin, it was a much needed respite. The Latin syllabus includes 1600 lines of text in Latin, each containing five to ten words, leading to over ten thousand words, hundreds of complex grammatical constructions, all in an extremely convoluted and, unfortunately, dead language.
The walls of Dr. Mash’s room are covered in posters describing ancient Rome, or Gaul, or Caesar’s attack on Britain.
Dr. Mash described himself as tired of the boring white walls; the AP Latin class seized upon this moment, and, keeping in trend with the art theme of post-AP exams, began their project: to turn Dr. Mash’s room into ancient Rome.
It started off small, just a plan to turn the two supporting pillars that protrude from his walls into Roman columns.
Kayla Jensen initially drew the ionic inscriptions onto the columns, then painted the pillar to match an ancient column.
Next, the class went back through and detailed lines over the paint to better describe the ancient Roman style.
However, the class was not satisfied with just columns. The rest of the walls were still blank. Next step: the gods and goddesses.
Gabe Castro drew stencils for the symbols of the thirteen deities that the class wished to paint. Next, the stencils were taped onto the wall and painted in gold, then outlined in black.
Finally, the names of the gods and goddesses were painted onto the wall, each highlighting the individual god or goddesses symbol.
This still was not enough for the AP Latin class. Along the back wall, they painted a to-scale Coliseum, on a background of blue and purple. This was the finishing touch on a large-scale renovation of the room.
The AP Latin class started what will hopefully be a long-lasting tradition. In the coming years, each AP Latin class can add on another ruin, another landmark, another symbol of the culture or heritage of Rome.
