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She's the queen of conjugation, the doyenne of declension, the goddess of grammar.
She's the lady of Latin.
She's Betty Merrill.
With her yardstick scepter and assistance from The Fates, she has been ruling the roost in Latin classes for 35 years now, bestowing gifts from the ancient world on hundreds of adoring high school students.
Some say she's the reason the Roman poet Horace coined the phrase "carpe diem."
Seize the day she does, every single day, for she believes every minute, every second, every verb, every noun, every lanky boy and every giggly girl count in the magnum opus of her life--drilling Latin into the brains of teenagers.
"They don't know it, but Latin's gonna save the world," she declares.
Alas, even queens must retire, and so it is with Betty Merrill. Last week at the city's James Monroe High School, she gave her last exam to weary fifth-years reading Catullus, to bleary-eyed translators of Cicero, and to shell-shocked grammarians of Latin II.
She transformed her final class of fresh-faced first-years into budding scholars with a new appreciation for a foreign language and a better understanding of the language they speak every day.
It's been a bittersweet year in Room 111 at James Monroe High School, where Merrill has reigned supreme for the past 17 years. Come September, one of her former students at JM will take up Merrill's yardstick scepter to become the new Latin teacher.
David Blosser says he's honored--but awed--to be following in her path.
"She inspired me with her enthusiasm, and I majored in classics and became a Latin teacher because of her. Those are pretty big shoes to fill."
Indeed they are. Merrill's students consistently rank at or near the top on state and national Latin exams, and this year marked the 11th out of the past 13 years that the program was awarded the plaque for being first place in the state by the Classical Association of Virginia.
On the National Latin Exam this year, 77 of her 85 students received scores placing them in the top two categories: summa cum laude and maxima cum laude. On the state exam, 10 students won first-, second-, or third-place awards.
Students, colleagues, and parents say the success stems from Merrill's high expectations and rigorous--even relentless--approach.
She starts teaching before the bell rings, teaches through announcements over the loudspeaker, teaches into the sound of the ringing bell between classes.
"Keep your seats," she says if she isn't quite finished when the bell rings.
She gives daily quizzes--yes, daily quizzes, the thought of which sends Latin I students into fits of anxiety till they get used to them and realize the quizzes simply reinforce what they learned the day before.
She thinks nothing of assigning third-year Cicero students 20 or 30 lines of translation a night, consigning them to two or three hours of homework in her class alone.
She gives homework on weekends and holidays, and you'd better get it done before class because she might call on you for an oral translation. And nobody wants to flub a translation and disappoint Mrs. Merrill.
Latin is anything but dead in Merrill's classes. She's a serious taskmistress, but she also makes learning fun.
"The Fates" actually choose students to perform orally in class, she says.
They're her index cards, one for each student in class, which she shuffles in preparation for random selection of students to translate a sentence or line or two of poetry.
But as the ruler of Room 111, she has been known to intervene with The Fates, causing The Fates to require the perpetrator of some act of mischief to translate an entire passage, while his fellow students giggle in the background.
As her students have come to know, Merrill doesn't leave anything to chance. She gladly chose a windowless classroom at JM to minimize distractions.
Inside Room 111, it never rains, it never snows, and nothing ever happens to draw students' eyes away from her performance at the head of the room.
But she knows that sometimes kids tune out, and she's ready for that, too.
She's covered the walls with artwork and calligraphy, there's a timeline of Roman history around the ceiling, a mural of Olympic gods on the back wall, Latin expressions all over the place.
"They might as well have something they can look at and learn from when they tune me out," she says.
The Fates may well have conspired years ago to make a memorable Latin teacher out of the young daughter of Gladys and Cronje Burnford Earp.
Gladys was from Georgia and Cronje was from eastern North Carolina, so they were Southerners to the core. But they were living in White Plains, N.Y., when Merrill and her older sister, Emory, were born. Cronje was pursuing his Ph.D. in Latin and Greek at Columbia University.
"People would ask Mother how she felt about having two Yankee daughters," Merrill said, "and this was always her response:
'Whatever do you mean? My girls are both Southerners! If a cat climbed in an oven and had kittens, you wouldn't call them biscuits!'"
By the time Merrill was 3 months old, the family was back in North Carolina, living in the town of Wake Forest, across the street from the university where her father was a professor of classics.
He would continue to teach until he was 80 years old, moving to Winston-Salem when Wake Forest University relocated there, and moving to Buie's Creek to teach 10 more years at Campbell University.
Growing up in an atmosphere in which Latin was fun, Merrill knew by the time she was in ninth grade that she wanted to teach Latin.
"Daddy's students were always coming over for hamburgers and he had such a wonderful relationship with them. It was really an inspiration to me."
"Every night at the dinner table," she says, "Daddy would tell us stories about things that had happened in his classes that day. And he would always end his stories by saying, 'And the class roared.'"
For a time while Merrill was in first or second grade, her father was bedridden with a back ailment, and he would conduct classes from his bed with students sitting all around the room.
"My room was across the hall, and I can remember sitting on my bed listening to everything they talked about and how much they laughed. Laughter was very much a part of his teaching style."
Every Sunday, her father invited four of his students to dinner after church, and when Merrill and her sister became teenagers, he allowed them to choose the students.
"Of course we always wanted to invite the cutest boys, so that was a lot of fun. And I don't know how Mother did it every week, preparing those beautiful meals and going to church, too. Many times she'd slip out of church whispering, 'I think I left the beans on.'"
Gradually, Merrill realized she had a head for Latin, and she found it interesting because it was complicated.
"I combined that with the fact that Daddy had so much fun with it, and I thought, 'If he can do it, why can't I?'"
So the next step after high school Latin was to become a student of her father at Wake Forest, where she majored in Latin and graduated in 1962. That's also where she met Sammy Merrill, whom she married the same year.
Merrill taught Latin in Raleigh for four years while her husband finished his undergraduate studies, spent a year as a seminary student, then switched to a master's program in German at Duke. Then they spent a year in Germany when he got a fellowship, then both returned to teach at Wake Forest.
For two years, her husband taught German and Merrill was a colleague of her father in the classics department. Then the couple moved to Ithaca, N.Y., where they lived while he earned his Ph.D. at Cornell.
Two children had come along by the time the family moved to Fredericksburg in 1973 when Sammy Merrill took a job teaching German at Mary Washington College. Elizabeth and Austin went to city schools, and Merrill began teaching at Stafford High School.
She was happy teaching there for 12 years, she says, but when the offer came to teach in the same school system her children attended, Merrill searched her soul and decided she "needed to walk on the edge again."
JM had only 14 students in the Latin program at the time, and the new teacher would be expected to make it grow.
That was 17 years ago, and though the school population has not gone up drastically, the number of Latin students has consistently increased. This past school year there were 85 students in Latin I, II, III, IV and V.
Merrill maintains that she has never had a bad day in the classroom, that there's never been a day that she hasn't wanted to go to school.
"Sometimes I get upset that the weekends get in the way," she says.
She has been a familiar sight walking to JM every morning, but few people realize she sings her way to school.
"I cannot carry a tune, but I love to sing," she says.
One morning it might be "On Top of Old Smokey," another it could be "Red River Valley" or "Morning Has Broken." Last April on her birthday she sang the Beatles song "When I'm 64."
On the first day of school, she's always sung "School Days."
Merrill readily admits she's concerned about being retired.
"I had a model for teaching in my father, but not a model for retirement," she says. "Daddy taught until he was 80 and only quit because he was sick, and he died two years later. He literally went from teaching to his deathbed, and that model has scared me."
But she says she believes the time is right for her to retire, and that it is important to accept the different phases of life. Sammy Merrill also retired this year and they want to travel, and she feels she is retiring "while I still have my wits about me."
"I can leave with wonderful memories, while I'm still at the top of my game and before someone says I should already have left. I still feel as if I'm maybe a step ahead of my students."
Her final school trip to Greece is planned for this summer, and she and her husband also have planned a trip to Spain.
But by the end of July, she fears she will start thinking about Latin again and how she might present the ablative absolute in a clearer fashion to her students, or what she could do to make the subjunctive easier to grasp. It's happened to her every summer for as long as she can remember, rethinking teaching strategies and getting excited about being back in the classroom.
But she does have plans for September that might help take her mind off the transition. She plans to take an art class at Mary Washington College.
"I used to do some oil painting and I really want to see what I can do with that. I'm going to take a sketch pad to Greece and make some drawings."
She says her husband is eager to experience retirement and the freedom it brings, and he was initially concerned that art classes would tie her down.
"But I told him this is something I really want to do, and I'm just going to have to take this retirement thing a day at a time."
"And besides," she says, "how can I be a famous artist if I don't start taking classes?"
Merrill has already changed the vanity license plates on her chariot, an older blue Volvo wagon.
For years, they read "DOCEO II."
"Doceo" is a present-tense verb meaning "I teach." The Roman numerals were a grammar reminder that the verb always takes two direct objects, the first of which is "students," a reminder to herself that students come before the subject being taught.
The new license plates contain only one word, "DOCUI."
It's a perfect-tense verb that any of Merrill's second-year, grammar-intensive students could translate, and any of her students would agree with its message.
"DOCUI" means "I taught."
Did she ever.
To reach SUSAN SCOTT NEAL: 540/374-5000, ext. 5701 sneal@freelancestar.com