[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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