I gotta tell you, this whole weekend, I was *totally* not getting the ablative case. Why and how to tell when it should be used, and why exactly it was different from the accusative, etc... just wasn't getting it. Even so, I decided I had to just keep going, retranslating some of the passages in the textbook for practice and hope that it came to me. And sure enough, it did. I was paying no attention to what I was doing and then all the sudden, I got to "nam Flaccus diu in agro laborat et fessus est" in Chapter 3 and it clicked. "Ager" is in the ablative there and it is because Flaccus is working inside the field, in a particular place. I looked back into earlier chapters and realized we'd been translating the ablative all along without noticing that was what we were doing! Ah-ha! Eureka! And in the very next sentence, "puer ad agrum festinat," "ager" is in the accusative because the boy is going to the field, but he's not there yet. After that, all the other reasons for why the ablative case is used instead of the accusative just started to fall into place in my head, as if it is perfectly sensible and why couldn't I see that before? I still don't know why I couldn't see that before, but I'm glad I do now!

Good luck to everyone else in their studying!

~Rachael Stern