Re: high school Greek (fwd)

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 25 1996 - 13:29:27 EDT


At 6:23 PM -0600 4/24/96, Ralph . Cherry wrote:
> Does anyone on the list have an answer for this lady? RC
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1996 15:07:43 -30000
> From: Patricia Calkins <pcalkins@vines.iusb.edu>
> To: Multiple recipients of list FLTEACH <FLTEACH@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
> Subject: high school Greek
>
> I am submitting this question for a student of mine. He teaches Latin and
> German at a local private high school. Next year some students would like to
> take Greek with him. His training in Latin and Greek are mostly connected to
> his theology degree, so he is not quite up to date on the textbooks that are
> used to teach Greek at the high school level. Can anyone help him out?
> You can respond privately to me and I will get the information to him.

I'm not sure just what's being used at the best local private high school,
although I've certainly had in the past some good students come to us.
However, there's an old favorite that is still used, I believe in the
Jesuit high schools, that teaches Homeric Greek and goes through parts of
the Odyssey about five or six lines per lesson. Contact your local Jesuit
schools and find out (I want to say it's Raymond Schoder, S.J., but I'm not
sure that he did it). A book that is still older and that some people
like--and I think it's still in print--is Crosby and Schaeffer, _An
Introduction to Greek_, last published, so far as I know still, by Allyn &
Bacon. Unfortunately (IMHO) it's built around the Anabasis of Xenophon,
which can be exciting to read if you read it through at a fast clip, but is
incredibly boring if you can only read five lines a lesson (Homer, on the
other hand, is sheer joy, no matter how little or much you read). A book
that is still used in the New England prep schools is Chase and Phillips,
_A New Introduction to Greek_, published by Harvard UP. There are people
who swear by it, and there was one year that I taught using it, but that
was long ago, and personally I think Harvard UP ought to be ashamed of
publishing it--but it's one of those things that is available and could be
used with bright High School students--personally I think that its
grammatical explanations are about the most pitifully inadequate I've ever
seen. But de gustibus non disputandum, etc., etc.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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