[B-Greek] pronunciation for beginning Greek students
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Oct 9 06:37:25 EDT 2008
(Note: Rather than wait for him to re-send, I'm forwarding directly to
the list a plain-text version of his message. This was necessitated by
an unfortunately growing tendency to send HTML/MIME formatted (styled)
messages longer than 50k to the list; since our list software requires
moderator approval for messages over 50k in length, such messages are
delayed until a moderator has checked and approved them. The problem
would be avoided if messages to the list are regularly sent in plain-
text. CWC)
> From: "Jeffrey T. Requadt" <jeffreyrequadt_list at hotmail.com>
> Date: October 9, 2008 4:42:58 AM EDT
> To: "B-Greek Mailing List" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Subject: pronunciation for beginning Greek students
>
>
> Another related question is, should we teach beginning Greek
> students something that they would have to change their
> understanding of later? I’m not questioning whether or not to keep
> things simple for a beginning student—I teach third grade, after
> all. They learn about the commutative property of addition, even if
> they haven’t learned algebraic representations of it. However, I
> think that’s a separate issue from teaching students one thing, just
> because it SEEMS easier, but is actually not true. Regardless of
> what pronunciation is used, I think it’s important to question the
> presuppositions of what “beginning” students should learn (and why)
> as opposed to “intermediate” or “advanced” students. Another math
> example is fractions. 1stgraders may not understand that 1/2 = 3/6,
> but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t teach them that two halves
> of a whole are exactly the same size. It’s very disconcerting to see
> math taught incorrectly as a result of the teacher trying to
> “simplify” it, and I wonder if we’ve done that in Greek classes as
> well. Now that I’m thinking about it, whatever happened to the 8-
> case system? When I started learning Greek, I learned all about the
> Ablative, Locative, and Instrumental cases and the fact that they
> had the same form as some other cases, but they served different
> functions/relationships. Is that not considered true anymore? Or did
> we just decide that since the genitive and ablative can both be
> *translated* many different ways, why not just include all those
> different ways as one case, since they all had one form? I.e., we
> combined the genitive and ablative into one case as a result of
> their form, even though they serve two different uses? I really have
> no idea, just questioning out loud.
>
> Jeffrey T. Requadt
> Dietz Elementary
> (520) 731-4000
>
> "I think standards are a great idea for other people." ~ Jeff Requadt
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