Editor’s Note: The piece below was published in The Weekly’s 2019 “Joke Issue.” All content, quotations, and other features are entirely fictitious. 

On the morning of March 25, 2019, a 29-year-old prank came to a close as Upper School Latin teacher Mark Aymar revealed to his five classes that he had been teaching them a made-up language for the entirety of their time in high school.

Amyar originally started teaching his students the made up language as an April Fool’s joke during his first year as a teacher at Parker. He had taught them real Latin for the first seven months of school. He planned to teach his Latin I class a few lessons of nonsense leading up to April 1st, give them a challenging quiz and then reveal to his students that the whole thing was a joke.

“It started as a harmless prank, I swear,” Aymar said, “but then it became addicting. Once I started teaching this made up language, I couldn’t stop. It was so easy that a Roman child could do it.”

Aymar has been teaching his students “a combination of gibberish, Klingon, and a few real Latin phrases here and there.” He also stated that he has taken inspiration from Pig Latin because “it’s similar enough to actual Latin but a whole lot easier.”

Aymar even went as far as to write his own textbook under the pen name Frederic M. Wheelock. Parker has purchased over 10,000 copies of the textbook since Aymar began teaching at the school.

To most of Aymar’s students, the big reveal was shocking. “He handed out Hillary Clinton coloring pages, threw bags of Cheez-Its at us, showed us a rubber fish that he kept in the top drawer of his desk, and then made his confession in the form of an original song,” junior Jared Saef, a Latin II student, said. “After that, he waltzed out with his banjo and left us to color in silence.”

Cole Rogers, one of the 40 seniors in Latin I this year, was devastated when he found out that Aymar’s teachings have been completely fictional. “Learning that everything Mr. Aymar had taught me was fake was the worst thing that has happened to me, ever,” Rogers said with tears in his eyes. “Because of his class, I felt like I had finally found my calling, and I was planning to major in Classical Language in college.”

Rather than reprimanding Aymar after the big reveal, Parker’s administration decided to give him a raise and make the fictional language the only language course offered at Parker. “Since the college process is getting more competitive each year, I advised the administration to keep Mr. Aymar’s course because he can give all of his students an automatic A. It’s a major GPA booster,” Director of College Counseling Susan Weingartner said.

Starting in the 2020 school year, taking the fake language will be mandatory for all Upper School students. It will appear on their transcripts as if they are taking a legitimate Latin language course.

To prepare for the influx of new students, Aymar will be teaching the language department the fake language over the summer. “I’m really excited to teach the faculty over there the new language,” Aymar said. “The thing I’m looking forward to the most is introducing them to my dear friends, Little Joey Participle and the State Trivia Rhyming Dog, and letting them have a taste of the shellaz in the tuna salad. Hip, hip, replacement!”