We all started freshman year as fragments of our respective sentences. Knowing that we were the subject of our own stories, we lacked the verbs and adjectives to define us, to make us whole.

Heading into Latin, I considered my peers as constructed sentences, a flow of uniform clauses stacked on top of one another.

I was wrong.

Despite my prior beliefs, no one in Ms. Dowling’s physics class knew where the charge came from. No one knew how to curate a flawless lab report. No one knew who they were.

And no one quite knows themselves four years later. Superposition and simple harmonic motion replace inertia and electromagnetism—the words we threw around in freshman year while lacking their definitions. We may have discovered that batteries solely push and pull charge rather than produce it, yet there will always be a new idea to learn, a new stream of words to string onto our sentences.

Although we all craved answers early on, as disjoint clauses seeking a solution to our dysfunction, we could depend on each other. We entered high school at varying sentence lengths, but we sat in the same classrooms with the same teachers and the same students and weaved each other’s separate sentences together. As a class, each connection we created knit us into a story.

Perhaps we embedded a series of flaws into the stitching of our story. Latin is not perfect. As someone who spent half of high school editing articles, sifting through sentences, perfecting phrases for publication, I saw how Latin whittled down some students’ words, creating gaps that no one filled.

The disconnect between our fractured sentences may have invoked despair, yet we still located our first verbs here. Descriptions soon followed. We started to define ourselves.

Alessandra Mafrici “sang,” and despite my distaste toward adverbs, she did so “beautifully.”

Charlie Cohen “explored,” scavenging our physics room daily and discovering new tools to tinker with.

Matilda Taylor “painted,” refining reality through the hues flowing from the bristles of her paintbrush.

Once we each gained a singular verb, we built upon it, but as multifaceted individuals, we couldn’t limit ourselves to just one word, which I didn’t realize until my junior year.

When my sophomore year English teacher, Mr. Tempone, encouraged me to tether words together in hopes that someone would want to read them, I labeled myself as someone who “wrote.”

Mr. Tempone left Latin the summer before my junior year. Without his guidance, I questioned the value of my words, as if he were the only person who thought my letters mattered, as if my love for writing were a fluke.

I thought I had lost my defining verb.

While I re-evaluated my reliance on words, Mr. McArthur, my junior year math teacher, introduced me to numbers. Images of graphs whirled in my mind when words failed, and the equations I would mentally configure soon became the subject of my writing. Thanks to Mr. McArthur, I discovered a new verb to coincide with “wrote”; I could “calculate,” too.

Sure, Sean Episcope could “pitch” (as a casual Princeton baseball commit), but he could also “joke,” ensuring daily entertainment in economics class.

Maybe Elliot Kovitz could “excel” in academics, but he could also “converse” before class and “perform” with perfect pitch and enthusiasm.

Joey Gorman could “strum” the guitar, but he could also “quantify” and “photograph.”

Although we often fixate on a single verb, we are all capable of obtaining so many more, yielding far more complex sentences (perhaps bordering on run-ons) with strong verbs and structures we once learned thanks to “Schoolhouse Rock.”

Together, Class of 2022, we crafted an intricate story filled with Chipotle and cheering bans, walking 10 miles a day during Project Week with Reed Rasmussen (he may or may not have asked for this feature), Kendrick’s jokes, and an unidentified “Latinhub22” user.

We discovered our words at Latin, and now it’s time to leave and continue our personal stories in the world beyond North and Clark.

P.S. for underclassmen: Sit with Sid Patel in every class you get the chance. NOT Evan Jones. Evan Jones approves this message.