4 years in high school and a semester in college. I took it in high school because my brother did, and I always heard stories about this crazy teacher. Once I took the class, I understood. He was definitely quirky, but he loved the language and the culture and wouldn't tolerate anyone that didn't give it the proper respect. The first year was the weed-out class to figure out who would stick with it and who would drop. From that point on, we were still "children" (specifically the "Children of the Peanut Gallery") and never "students". As he said, we hadn't "arrived" to that level. By senior year, there were only 6 of us left and in April he finally called us "students". Being only girls left, we all started crying, because we knew it actually meant something. Any questions about his life were answered with "That's none of your business, little girl." Every year we'd take an ill-fated trip to NYC under the guise of studying the city because it was modeled after Rome. Usually there was some type of accident involved, but we always had fun. If you couldn't keep up with him walking, you'd be left behind, and he'd give us a map before we left with places you could find a phone to call him To this day, my brother and I still keep in touch with him and occassionally go to his house to drink wine and talk.

We never learned much vocab, it was a dead language and we prefered to keep it that way (Latin is a language, as dead as it can be. It killed the ancient Romans, and now it's killing me!). We did lots of translations and conjugating and declining. I'll never forget during a test one day my friend broke down in tears. When asked what the problem was, she blurted out "We never learned the subjunctive!" That was a total lie, but he felt awful and told us to skip that section Yeah, I have a lot of happy memories from that class.