[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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