[B-Greek] Class Frequency

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Apr 16 10:06:43 EDT 2007


I'm sure that this is a matter on which opinions will differ -- it may
even amount to "Quot homines tot sententiae." I personally think
that maximum exposure is optimal: 5 days a week even if not 60
(or 50) minutes per class.

On the other hand, my actual experience over several decades of
teaching was that what mattered more than in-class hours was
students' intelligent expenditure of study time on Greek regularly
out of class. It was also my experience that more class hours per
week didn't improve really bad students and fewer class hours per
week didn't harm really good students.

Probably the chief function of a teacher of Greek is to introduce
new material and to be available to answer questions.

IF teacher and students were doing it Randall's way -- orally in
Greek and using the Greek also as a metalanguage -- then I think
five meetings per week would be very well spent and the learning
would go far deeper.

On Apr 16, 2007, at 9:34 AM, Mark Cain wrote:

> 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

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/





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