Finding Your Latin Fam:
A #JCLOVE Letter
Salvete vos omnes. After spending my whole life in the (unironically) great state of Florida, I’ve decided to pick up and move to California to begin my college career at AJU. Five of my eighteen years there were spent with the FJCL. Now that I’m trying to settle into CASCL, I figured I’d lay down some knowledge on what makes us at FJCL, the state everybody loves to hate, who we are.
Some fast facts: Florida is broken down into eight regions that hold regional competitions in January. In April, all 48 or so of us get together at a hotel in Orlando for three days of state convention. In November we have a Fall Forum at a high school in Orlando, which is pretty new for us, and I honestly only went to once.
But now for more about me.
Y’all, I was not good at Latin. I did take it for five years. Those five years only got me a two on my AP exam because hey, Latin, whatever! I’m not sure I could decline puella for you. I could tell you quite a bit about Latin Literature, but only because I actually studied for that.
What I was good at was JCL. I was president of my delegation for three years, and we grew in size from 27 members to 118 in that time. I was not a state officer, but I was a local leader of Florida’s Region V two years in a row.
We held meetings every week during lunch and played more certamen than you would think. We drew on Magistra’s windows with dry erase markers. We designed t-shirts with sheep on them. We created a shrine to an old Latin teacher. We took a “field trip” to the dumpster to hold a funeral for a broken office chair. We got aerosols banned from our Latin class permanently.
My best JCL memory is at the end of FJCL state 2018. My school placed 12th in the cumulative sweepstakes competition, breaking the top 15 schools for the first time in our history. After five years of hard work, friends I had been with since middle school celebrated our victory even though we were quite far from the top.
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