Thanks to the Amy High Fellowship, I was able to attend my first SALVI event last summer. I hope it will be the first of many! Attending Rusticatio Veteranorum 2016 afforded me the unique opportunity to truly immerse myself in Latin for over a full week. While other such events are often only partial due to restrictions of location or dining options, Rusticatio is wholly self-contained. Unfortunately, making it all-inclusive means the price is also all-inclusive. As a high school Latin teacher in a poor, rural district, I don’t exactly have access to a big professional development budget. The Amy High Fellowship meant I could travel all the way to West Virginia and enjoy the range of benefits offered by a fully immersive event.
Rusticatio gave me a lot more than just language immersion time, however. My favorite thing about being there was the atmosphere. One of the tenets is: inter amicos versaris, i.e. “you’re among friends.” I’ve never been a very social person, and the idea of suddenly being stuck in a house with thirty people I don’t know for a week would normally be pretty terrifying. But it wasn’t. The assumption that everyone is already friends, simply by dint of being there, makes it a really safe, calming place for a socially anxious person. I only had to go hide a little bit, and I was able to talk to one of the instructors when I felt overwhelmed.
Because I felt socially safe, I was able to get a lot out of the experience of being surrounded by excellent Latin speakers. My goals going into it were to improve my spoken Latin to the point that I could use more complex structures, especially subjunctives and participles. In the end, what I picked up instead was a surprising facility with gerunds as well as innumerable expressions and indefinable Latinisms that I’m sure I use all the time without being able to trace them back to one particular conversation.
I also really enjoyed the opportunity to read Latin again. I am not good at the kind of self-motivation it takes to start a daily Latin reading habit, or maybe I just haven’t tried properly. Either way, what Rusticatio gave me was an opportunity to read Latin– Latin that was new to me, also– and to discuss it in a very low pressure context. I could ask questions without feeling dumb and express opinions without worrying that they were too obvious or too vague, as they might have been in one of my grad school seminars. The readings were certainly challenging, but because of the way we approached them, there was nothing discouraging or frightening about reading them together.
That mixture of comfort and challenge is probably the essence of what I got out of Rusticatio. I would unquestionably go every year if resources and time allowed. For introducing me to this world, I will forever be grateful to SALVI, their donors, and the Amy High Fellowship.