It is November 10, 2014, an unusually warm night for the season.  Latin students from near and far, including our very own Reginites, have gathered at New Trier High School for the Certamen competition.  Certamen means “competition” in Latin, and it is basically a Latin quiz bowl, similar to Latin jeopardy.  For those of you who have seen Mean Girls, it is comparable to the mathletes competition. 

Here is a basic rundown of how it is run:

• There are multiple competitions going on at once, each in a different classroom at New Trier.
• Desks are arranged in groups of four and there are three teams in each room.
• The moderator is a local Latin teacher.
• There are toss up questions, that any team can answer.  The team that answers the toss up correctly gets two bonus questions  just for their team to answer.  There are 20 toss up questions per round.
• There are buzzers to buzz in answers.
• The questions are based on topics such as Latin language translation, Roman history and culture, Greek mythology, and more.

Several area schools participated and included Loyola, Northside Prep, Evanston Township High School, Resurrection, New Trier, and several others.

The group of Reginites that competed included a novice team made up of Sharika Elahi ’17, Elizabeth Hancuch ’17, Maddy Bazarek ’17, Katie Alleman ’17, and a lower team made up of Clare Broderick ’16, Brigid Broderick ’15, Grace Spiewak ’15, and Niamh Ryan ’15. 

The novice team won third place overall and the lower team beat the sophomore boys from Evanston.

Ms. Block, Latin teacher, heard about the competition through the grapevine.  Every high school Latin student is invited to participate.  It is almost like a tradition, and has been around for decades.

Although she was nervous about the outcome, Block was pleased in the end, “We practiced all week using the Certamen iPhone app, and I wasn’t positive how well they would do since it was their first time, but I was pleasantly surprised.”

Katie Alleman ’17 was also nervous about competing, “To be honest, I thought we were going to do a lot worse than we actually did because we hadn’t practiced that much and it was our first Certamen. I also was expecting the questions to be much harder and to not know any of the answers.”

The general consensus among Regina students is that the competition went much better than expected. However, some students expectations were rooted in stereotypes, “I was expecting a bunch of nerds that were hard core latin students and very awkward. And I was right,” said Clare Broderick ’16.

Overall, everyone had a lot of fun.“I enjoyed it. I am looking forward to the next Certamen in December because we now have a better idea of what to study and we will hopefully improve,” said Alleman.

According to Broderick, “It was a lot of fun. Like way more fun than expected. We’re doing more competitions in the winter and are super pumped.”

Certamen competitions occur monthly, contact Ms. Block if you want to get involved (latin students only) or just be a spectator!