From nauplion@charm.net Mon Jan 1 09:24:40 2001 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW00.12) with ESMTP id JAA23066 for ; Mon, 1 Jan 2001 09:24:39 -0800 Received: from fellspt.charm.net (root@[199.0.70.29]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id JAA29072 for ; Mon, 1 Jan 2001 09:24:35 -0800 Received: from charm.net (coretel-116-192.charm.net [209.143.116.192]) by fellspt.charm.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA25372 for ; Mon, 1 Jan 2001 12:23:51 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3A50BB88.78047A71@charm.net> Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2001 12:17:01 -0500 From: Diana Wright X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-DIAL (Win95; U) X-Accept-Language: en,el,tr MIME-Version: 1.0 To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: Esame di Maturita` References: <01c07415$b8cdbc80$LocalHost@lizard> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The year of 3rd grade I was in 4 different schools, one of them with 5 different classrooms plus home room plus assembly [which began daily with "Class, put your books on the floor, be quiet, and sit up straight."]. Every teacher had a different rule for how & where to write your name, class, date on the paper. I still have occasional nightmares about the where & how. This is probably terribly fraught. My mother at 84 has nightmares about medical school where she could not afford to buy the required texts & had to borrow from friends & sometimes didn't get the assignment read. DW Gianfranco Boggio-Togna wrote: > Alfred Kriman quoted Emilio Segre': > > > I do not remember that Fermi ever referred to his Latin studies, but > > many years later, at Los Alamos, I complained one day that the night > > before I had dreamed of a final liceo examination in Greek, to which > > he remarked that he had suffered similar nightmares. > > This strikes a chord: nearly forty years later, I still occasionally > have nightmares and I am sure this is true of anyone who ever went > through the old-style (pre-68) Esame di Maturita`. It is hardly > surprising, when one considers what it involved. > > Four written tests: an essay on a literary or historical subject; a > translation from Latin; a translation *into* Latin; a translation > from Greek. Then the viva voce in front of a commission (generally > headed by a University professor) of teachers one had never seen, on > each of the subjects of the curriculum: Italian literature, Latin > literature and grammar, Greek literature and grammar, Philosophy, > History, History of Art, Mathematics, Physics, Natural Science. > > On the other hand, it cannot be said that we lacked training in taking > exams : by the time I entered the Liceo I had already passed five > different sets of examinations. > > -- > Gianfranco Boggio-Togna > Milano (Italy) .