[B-Greek] Casualties of the Beginning Greek class
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Thu Feb 4 06:52:02 EST 2010
This morning the 'Old Curmudgeon' -- Laudator Temporis Acti cites
Hanson & Heath, _Who Killed Homer_ on the dropouts, week by week,
from the first-year Greek class, as they encounter first-declension masculine
nouns and three meanings of AUTOS ... What makes it funny and pathetic
for any veteran teacher of Greek is that it rings so true (of course students of
French encountering irregular verbs and verbs with à and de may complain
but they do become inured to them through conversation). The following
piece cited at
http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2010/02/come-on-in-you-wounded-greeklings.html
= http://turl.ca/brgpnyk
=====
After the first three weeks of the beginning Greek class, 20 percent of the
students are unfortunately conked, casualties of the masculine nouns of
the first declension. Others are DOA thanks to the pronoun autos. The
find that the autos monster can mean three altogether different things
("him/her/it/them," "-self," or "same"), depending on both its case and
its position in a sentence. Students do withdraw from an introductory
Greek class before they taste Plato or the Gospels, these bored, annoyed,
and exhausted ninteen-year-olds, those very prospects who you once hoped
would go on to Thucydides—and perhaps be one of the 600 each year in
America who still major in Classics. They slide now across the hall to squeeze
into the university's over-enrolled Theory of Walking, Rope Climbing, and
Star Trek and the Humanities, which will assuage and assure them that they
are, all in all, pretty nice kids, classes that will offer the veneer of self-esteem
but will guarantee that they will probably lose what little sense of real
accomplishment they had carried within to begin with. You can nearly hear
those doctors of therapy, those professors of recuperation at the lecture-hall
door: "Come on in, you wounded Greeklings. It's not your fault. They had
no business subjecting you to all that rote; we do things a lot differently here.
Relax, sit back, breathe deeply, and tell us how you feel."
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And what's the American seminary equivalent? Classes in exegesis based
upon your favorite version or interlinear?
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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