Orcas will soon send homegrown Latin scholar Ewan Lister off to UW

— from Francie Kisko —

Eight years ago, a father and his young son and daughter walked into my adult Beginning Latin Course. It was the Lister family: Ian, Ewan, and Flora. I was intending to use the Oxford Latin Course texts, which I thought might be a bit too advanced for the younger Listers, but if they were willing to try, I was willing to teach them.

The class was held year round, one day a week for two hours. Though Flora had to drop out of class due to other commitments, Ewan, only eleven at the time, settled right into the adult class and kept up academically with the adults, often even surpassing them. He learned and became especially adept at parsing and diagramming Latin sentences and scanning poetry. After the sudden death of his father, sixteen-year-old Ewan continued Latin classes on his own, which showed great maturity and tenacity.

Over the eight years, Ewan completed all the Latin grammar (including gerunds and gerundives!) in the Oxford series and has been reading excerpts from the original works of Cicero, Caesar, Livy, and the poets Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil. He spent last summer working on a long letter of Pliny the Younger.

All this study occurred over and above his regular school classes, plus community band concerts, part-time work, student government involvement, golf with the Orcas HS Golf Team, summer camps, and academic workshops. Throughout these many years, I have been very honored to have him as my Latin student; he has been a delight to me and to his fellow Latin students. The whole island community shouldbe very proud of him. He is a very academically gifted and talented young man. And now, our loss will be University of Washington’s gain.

Congratulations on your graduation from high school, Ewan. I and all the other Latin “Groupies” will miss you very much!