If someone told you they were starting from scratch in your particular subject area, what advice would you give them?
PM: I’m a grammarian, and I would say to talk to Simon.
SV: For Grammar, I would advise them to start by asking their Latin teacher for more work until they ran out of work, then to start looking at Grammar books, and finally to just start reading literature.
MN: If someone were to start out in Literature, I'd tell them to start by getting a copy of Conte's textbook on Latin Literature. I've found the vast majority of question writers favor that source, so they should go through that and take notes on all the prelims authors (while also reviewing the information). Once they've gotten down the prelims authors, I'd have them start taking notes on semis and finals authors in Conte. At the same time they start learning harder material, they should branch into into non-Conte sourcebooks such as Moses Hadas, the Oxford Classical Dictionary, and the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature so that they can learn the really obscure facts that question writers like to pull out of nowhere.
JA: My subject is mythology, so my advice would be to start by reading all of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, since most of the lower level questions come from that. I would also just play a lot of questions, write down what you don’t know, and then study that.
MH: If someone told me they were just starting on myth, I’d tell them to work on building knowledge; instead of trying to cram everything the day before a certamen, try taking maybe fifteen minutes every day just to review and take notes on new material. Myth is hard enough with the amount of stuff you need to know, and cramming isn’t really a sustainable strategy (and isn’t for any category, really).
Which round that you played at Nationals was your favorite, and why?
MH: I would say the final round. It sounds weird to say that, what with how it ended and everything, but I still feel like the final round was where we played our best round of the entire tournament. Even after being down 20 points at the half-point, we brought ourselves together as a team and didn’t give up. We encouraged each other for every buzz, worked together as a team of four and not as four individuals, and that’s how we got so far. The fact that we lost by so little is sad, but we wouldn’t have even made it that far without playing as well as we did, and that’s what makes me proud of my team’s performance during that round.
JA: My favorite round that I played this year was definitely the finals. Even though we didn’t win, I had more fun in that round than in any of the other rounds. I felt really calm, which is something that doesn’t happen very often, and I got four questions so that was a good round for me.
MN: I liked round 2 because the moderator made fun of Jonk.
SV: My favorite round at Nationals was semi-finals because we crushed our opponents and did not have to deal with the pressure of finals.
PM: I liked round three the best because that’s when I made the buzz mentioned above.
What's your favorite Certamen-related memory?
SV: My favorite certamen-related memory has to be practicing and eating candy in the Fiesta Room during my Novice year.
PM: My favorite Certamen memory is the whole “pertubered” incident (you know what I’m talking about).
MN: My favorite Certamen-related memory was my first Finals round in Colorado JCL. My team was down by 40 halfway through the round but we ended up getting six of the last seven to win. As soon as the round ended my school swarmed the stage and wrapped me and my teammates up in a group hug.
MH: The ostrich debacle. It was a passage question, a funerary inscription, and John, our historian, buzzed in on “What –” and said “Ostrich!” (which was obviously wrong) because he had heard “astra tenent animam”, completely ignored the verb, thought it said “animal” not “animam”, thought “astra animal” was one word “astranimal”, figured it sounded like “ostrich”, and answered with it. It is by far the most botched up answer I have ever heard to a Certamen question, period.
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