[B-Greek] Class Frequency
Mark Cain
mark at markcain.com
Mon Apr 16 09:34:17 EDT 2007
I was a Greek and Hebrew student a couple of decades ago over a period of 5
years. I found language skills to be very similar to math skills --
proficiency before moving forward to new concepts was the best way to enable
continued success and ultimately mastery. For me proficiency came with a
daily exposure to the concepts even though my classes met 3 times a week.
If you could get your students to commit to regular, systematic study
outside the classroom -- ughh! college students -- scratch that thought.
FWIW, with my own children studying foreign languages in school even though
they were on block scheduling (5 classes over 2 weeks), my insistence on
daily exposure to the language allowed them to excel.
In a phrase "more of smaller chunks is better than fewer larger chunks".
Mark Cain
Sarasota, FL USA
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Penner" <ken.penner at acadiau.ca>
To: "greek B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 9:03 AM
Subject: [B-Greek] Class Frequency
> Dear B-Greekers,
>
> How many times a week should an Introductory New Testament Greek class
> meet?
>
> My own sense (based on some research I did 12 years ago) is that meeting
> three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) for 50 minutes is
> preferable to meeting twice a week for 75 minutes, or once a week for 150
> minutes, so that students have a chance to assimilate what they have
> learned before moving on. Therefore this is what I recommended to our
> academic dean. Today that recommendation was questioned, so I thought I'd
> seek the experience of others on this question. The textbook used in this
> case will probably be Mounce's. (I don't want to get into the question of
> inductive/immersion methods; I can't change that for next year.) Might it
> take too long to settle the class in a 50-minute session, or are there
> other drawbacks I might not have considered?
>
> Ken
>
> Ken M. Penner, Ph.D.
> Acadia/Greek&Hebrew
> Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic vocabulary memorization software:
> http://purl.org/net/kmpenner/flash
> ---
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