[B-Greek] Re: Mounce's Books

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Dec 11 11:42:39 EST 2003


At 9:18 AM -0500 12/11/03, Cal Redmond wrote:
>Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>> At 10:37 PM +0800 12/10/03, Oscar P Villa wrote:
>>
>>> Dear friends,
>>> I have been looking into ways to equip others with a tools-based (not-
>>> having-to-memorize-all-those-forms-because-you-can-look-it-up)
>>> approach to Greek. I know, I know, a little learning is dangerous,
>>> but I'll ask the following anyway:
>>>
>>
>> Carl Conrad wrote:
>
>       It's not that it's dangerous; rather,in my opinion, this is a way
>to assure that one will never         really learn Greek.
>
>While I share Carl's view in many ways (and always respect it!), in
>April and May of this year I taught Oscar Villa and three other bright,
>motivated students in Manila who had learned the "tools" approach to
>begin to read Greek. My preference would be to teach such students in a
>traditional manner, but nonetheless I found that because I did not have
>to spend as much time explaining the concepts of Greek (case, verb
>tense, voice, mood,  etc.), I was able to teach them to recognize the
>forms fairly rapidly. In about 15 two-hour class segments, they learned
>about as much as they would have known in an 8 to 10 week
>"introductory/Baby Greek" class of the type many seminaries offer (and I
>completed as a student).  The motivational key was to demonstrate that
>reliance on parsing guides and interlinears did not give the same
>ability to understand and exegete a passage, and to demonstrate the many
>similarities in verbal personal endings so that they did not feel that
>every form was unique and needed to be memorized separately.

I too have had some exceptional students in my teaching career between 1961
and 2001, at least two of them comparable to what you say of Oscar Villa;
those two didn't really need a teacher and would have learned from just
about any textbook or method of teaching. But that kind of student is a
rare gem, and I don't think one can cater one's pedagogical method to the
likelihood of confronting a lot of students of that sort.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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