A Cold Glass of Milk

Our review now ended and the year stretching out ahead, we find ourselves in an uncomfortable place confronting participles on the page.
I confess, I enjoyed writing that last sentence.  I snuck in a few participles.  Can you find them?
Participles are often difficult to recognize--both in English and Latin.  In English, as we discussed in class, they mirror the forms found in some verbs.  This is particularly troubling since in such verbs the participle contains the action of the idea, and we mistakenly think the action must be the verb.  Right?  And in Latin we struggle to keep them separate from the verb since our translation moves us to the dreaded verb-as-understanding, especially when we see we use dependent clauses for much that Latin expresses as participles (Magister, you lost me at "dependent").
So what are we to do?
Well, first, let's take a breath and admit there may be some rough sailing ahead.  Weakness in vocabulary and struggles with the role of the cases will make participles difficult to understand.  The best responses are to double down on our commitment to Latin, slow down our reading rate to fewer words per minute, and work with the reading towards comprehension.  Anxiety or unrealistic expectations will not help here.
Second, let's look at what participles are presenting to see how we can understand what they are saying--preferably keeping it in Latin--and gain a measure of confidence with them.
In the next several posts I will try to simplify participles for us.  Not make them simple--this is not a panacea--but reduce the grammar noise and narrowly consider what they do and how they do it.  While I do that, why don't you go get a cold glass of milk, a couple of cookies, and settle in.  This is going to take a while.