A few days ago, I sat my last Latin and biology GCSE papers (there are 3 Latin papers in total and 2 biology ones – biology went all right, not enough to say about that for a whole other post). A week before that, I sat my middle Latin paper, which was testing me on various Ancient Roman prose passages that I’d be studying – namely, extracts from Livy’s account of Hannibal crossing the Alps; letters from the governor Pliny to the Emperor Trajan; and Caesar’s account of how he invaded Britain.
I feel like that exam went fine – I didn’t think those were my absolute best essays in the world, but I’m pretty happy. My third and last exam was testing me on passages from the Aeneid that I’d been studying – specifically the parts in which Priam tries unsuccessfully to resist the Ancient Greeks, and Aeneas flees Troy with his family and loses his wife Creusa along the way.
The exam has a few different types of questions: simple one- or two-markers that just make sure you understood the text; slightly longer, 4-markers that usually ask you to comment on the writing style and literary devices etc; a 5-marker in which you have to translate a given passage into English; an 8-marker, which is a more open-ended essay question which requires you to back up your points with quotes from a specific Latin passage; and finally a big long 10-marker, which requires you to draw on your knowledge of all the passages to answer an essay question.
In my past papers I’d been doing pretty well with all these kinds of questions. However, the big important 10-marker in my paper was really difficult and kind of ridiculous! It was: “The passages are very dramatic, full of human interest. In what ways is this a good description of the passages?”
I didn’t know what “human interest” meant! Apparently it’s a very obscure and specific term used mostly in regards to journalism. If a story is full of human interest it means the readers can relate to it. (Even if I had known what it meant, how can a reader possibly relate to the tribulations of Trojan women having their city destroyed by Ancient Greeks?!).
At the time I interpreted the question to meant just general interest – ie write about how interesting the passages were. Hopefully the examiner will see that I didn’t understand the phrasing of the question and won’t penalise me for that, but maybe not. Fingers crossed.