[B-Greek] Never underestimate your students (was something about Pachyderms and other thick-skinned creatures)
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Fri Feb 19 08:35:36 EST 2010
On Feb 19, 2010, at 8:20 AM, nebarry at verizon.net wrote:
>
> Original Message:
> -----------------
> From: Sarah Madden sarah.r.madden at gmail.com
> Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:30:46 -0500
>
>>> If nothing else, perhaps this mght have encouraged him to be careful about
> veering off of his prepared notes, or at least to bring his Greek text with
> him when he teaches ...<<
>
> Sarah, I've been on the receiving end of that deal, and it taught me always
> to double check the Greek text, even when I am absolutely sure of the form.
>
> It also reminds me of a student I had my first year teaching at TAA. Now,
> I had a fairly good amount of teaching experience when I started here, at
> the high school, college and graduate levels. I was reading a particular
> text with this student, and noted something in the text, which I mentally
> marked "She won't ask me about this." The first thing she asked was about
> that! It reminded me to be well prepared and never underestimate your
> students. That student, BTW, is now a classics major...
I have learned more from students over the years than I have from most of
the textbooks I ever used. Sometimes it's been a matter of questions raised
by students that led to research and discovery of fascinating -- and useful --
truths about Greek and linguistic history. Sometimes it's been a matter of
students questioning the conventional explanations and illuminating the
issues freshly.
This is not unrelated to one of our recurrent observations about commentaries:
so often they seem to ignore the questions you really have about the text
they are explicating and to explain all sorts of things that you didn't (and
still don't) want to know. On the other hand there are some real gems of
commentaries that illuminate and astound in ways passing understanding.
What that means, I think, is something we've noticed before: Pedagogical
tradition, which is both a bane and a benison, still rests upon the shoulders
of gneration after generation of the students of the language.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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