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Hello all! Next
Hello all! Next week I’ll be attending the NJCL convention in Tennessee, and so as not to annoy my non-JCL friends with my incessant yapping I thought I'd create a quick little thread where I can ramble. Conversing is of course welcomed and encouraged, but since this is mostly a place for me to geek out my posts will probably be fairly nonsensical and random, so enter at your own risk! Feel free to ask any questions about JCL, certamen, or convention if you want to know more about anything I ramble about, and I’ll try to answer them!
What is JCL? JCL, short for "Junior Classical League", is an extracurricular for students of the classics, aka Latin and Greek, to connect with each other and learn more about the wonderful world of the past!
What is the NJCL convention? Every year, JCLers from across the country (hence the "N", for National-- technically a misleading name since there's one person from South Korea) attend a week-long convention filled with activities, contests, competitions, and lectures relating to the classics. For the right people, it will pretty much be the
What is certamen? A huge part of any convention is certamen, which literally means "competition" in Latin. It's a quiz bowl-style game with questions related entirely to the classics! It can be divided into four categories: mythology, culture (which I study), history, and language (which I study). More on that later!
That's all for now, I’ll continue posting updates/long random rambles throughout the week :D
submitted by Vi
(July 19, 2024 - 7:49 am)
(July 19, 2024 - 7:49 am)
that sounds so cool :DDD also, I think my mom was part of JCL---wait I'll ask her later. But that sounds so cool!! And I keep forgetting to say but on the vexillogy thread, your posts about mottos and stuff were so interesting to read, and your posts elsewhere about Latin roots and stuff are too, so I'll definitely be reading here and thank you bc THAT'S SO COOL :DD
(July 19, 2024 - 1:06 pm)
This actually means so much to me because I always feel like I'm being too annoying when I talk about Latin so much :') I know etymology and mottos because of the "more on that later" of language-- although it's about 80% grammar/vocab, there are also two subcategories which I study: derivatives and PMAQ! Derivs is fairly self-explanatory, it's just Latin roots. PMAQ stands for phrases, mottos, abbreviations, quotations; it's basically Latin in modern-day use, some well known examples being things like e pluribus unum, et cetera, or veni vidi vici. Ah, there I go again rambling, sorry lol.
(July 19, 2024 - 2:48 pm)
I will be back after I go look all that stuff up :P but yes, it's all so interesting!! Also I asked and turns out my mom was... wow, super involved in JCL. So. :)
(July 19, 2024 - 5:51 pm)
That's awesome omg!! It's always so cool finding adults who were involved and didn't become Latin teachers-- I must admit I forget they exist sometimes :'0
(July 19, 2024 - 6:12 pm)
Hehee, yeah. When I asked her about it, she got really excited, which was fun to see :)
I finally looked up all that stuff and wow that's amazing. And I did not know et cetera was Latin!!!! :D
(July 22, 2024 - 11:34 am)
Oops, I realized I didn't finish a sentence in the original post. I meant to write "it will pretty much be the highlight of the summer", my bad!
(July 19, 2024 - 2:50 pm)
Sounds very cool!
(July 21, 2024 - 2:02 am)
We have officially made it to convention!! We had a bit of a fiasco at the airport-- I thought I lost my boarding pass so one of the teachers and I were a good twenty minutes behind everyone else because we had to get me a new one, and I felt really bad for slowing her down. Then it turned out that my friend had taken mine by mistake after she put hers in her bag :'0
(July 21, 2024 - 5:22 pm)
A successful first day :D We're all very tired (we were awake for 20 hours straight yesterday!) and nervous but the fun has just begun! Today we have to register our arts entries, take the first round of academic contests, and we have our first certamen round.
(July 22, 2024 - 5:19 am)
Wow, 20 hours... but yayy!! Good luck!!!
(July 22, 2024 - 11:08 am)
Our round went really well!! We went up against NC and CA, and won 275-65-0. As a measure of how good that is, that's 275 out of 400 total points, 15 out of 20 tossup questions, 35 out of 40 of their bonus questions, and 40 out of 60 total questions. None of us were really expecting it, our coach included, since at practice the other team from our state always was able to beat us by 20 or so points... oops. We're currently in second-- another team got over 300 (!!) points-- but we just need to get top nine to get into semifinals!
(July 23, 2024 - 7:03 am)
...wow. :0 that's amazing!!! Congrats!!! Good luck to you and your team to keep the winning streak next round!!
(July 23, 2024 - 9:40 am)
There's a rock here that students are allowed to paint over with spray paint. When we got here it said "Will you marry me? Jason x Jessica, 7/19/24" with a heart. Now...
I've deleted the rock photo, Vi. I'm sorry, but it makes the location too idenifiable.
Admin
(July 23, 2024 - 5:21 pm)
My apologies! The rock was saying "Will you promote the classics", the names were replaced by "NJCL" and the year in Roman numerals, and the date was replaced by the dates of convention.
(July 23, 2024 - 10:52 pm)
So sorry, the convention exhaustion caught up to me and I just did not have enough energy to keep posting here :'0 However, we safely returned home on the 27th and so here is a mega-update on how things have been!
Certamen: We played well in our prelims and placed third in the seedings for semifinals, but unfortunately we were eliminated in semis by another team. No offense to anyone from that state, but... I'm not even sure they've heard the word "sportsmanship" in their lives. They're a very rude team. We ended up placing fourth overall, which I'm quite happy with :D
Awards: I'm very very proud of my performance this year-- I never expected any of this, but it's so gratifying seeing all my hard work pay off <3 For testing, I placed third on Latin grammar; second on PMAQ, academic heptathlon, reading comprehension; and first on Roman life, Latin derivatives, and Latin vocabulary. I tied for overall high score on Latin derivatives, which I'm especially proud of because this is the very first year I can take the test! For graphic arts, I... literally placed second on every single thing I entried lolll. Not that I'm upset-- I can recognize when someone is more talented than me :) I also placed seventh on overall graphic arts, sixth on overall academics, and fifth (!) in overall sweepstakes!! Most awards are just out of fellow ninth graders, but overall awards are out of everyone attending.
Future Plans: Well, with the conclusion of the tournament I'm officially no longer an intermediate certaminator-- I'm advanced now! With that comes a new topic, literature, which I plan to pick up in the remainder of the summer... as well as doing my summer assignments, boo :(
Overall, this year's convention was a ton of fun and I'm so so so happy that I got to attend it. JCL means more to me than could ever be said, and it's awesome having a physical reminder of how amazing it and the entire classics community is every single year. Here's to many more <3
(July 29, 2024 - 8:24 pm)