Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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FORUM
n
n a recent article in the Forum,1 G. Anthony Gorry conveys a
phenomenal appreciation for the mysteries of ancient Greek.
Even as I salute Dr. Gorry, I fear that we as teachers have not
served him well. He describes an experience common among students
of Greek, including rapidly shrinking classes and a lingering sense of
bewilderment, and offers an apt simile: "If we taught swimming this
way, we would give children a couple of talks on hydro-dynamics
and throw them into the water." The extraordinary devotion of a stu-
dent like Dr. Gorry does not absolve us of our responsibility for pro-
viding a sane, reliable path toward comprehension of the language.
Fundamentally changing the way we teach Beginning Greek
is not easy. We all tend to teach the way we were ourselves taught,
or in opposition to it. Progressively, we try to teach our beginning
students everything we were expected to know and additional ma-
terial we now feel we should have known. Consequently, Beginning
Greek has come to take the form of all-inclusive training rather than
introductory practice in the basics. It is not surprising, then, that some
popular Greek textbooks are hundreds of pages long. The theory
seems to be that students must be exposed to nearly every possible
form and construction before they read original texts.
In recent years I have adopted the stance that we need to teach
less, not more, in Beginning Greek in order to be more effective.
Beginning students are just that: beginners. They should begin to
read Greek, and gradually, but steadily learn to read it better. Greek
should not require special gifts and unwieldy dedication for months
before students read a page with comfort, for students can be com-
fortable reading even if they do not comprehend every detail they
see. This curricular change requires a change of expectations. Often
teachers expect that students should be ready for graduate school
after a year or so of Greek. Indeed, whenever I discuss reducing the
demands of Beginning Greek, half of the time the first question I
receive is, "But what about graduate school...?" I know of no other
language in which a student is expected to be ready for graduate
work after two to four classes.
1 G. Anthony Gorry. 2006/ 07. "On Still Not Knowing Greek." CJ 102: 155-8.
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94 WILFRED E. MAJOR
Vocabulary
2 In 2002, Helma Dik at the University of Chicago used the database of Greek
texts on the Perseus Project to generate a list of 50 lemmas comprising half of the texts.
As Perseus has added more Greek texts, for a current total of about 4.2 million words,
I have compiled updates to the list, which now includes 65 lemmas. The list is
available on-line at http:/ /www.artsci.lsu.edu / classics / greek/.
3 The raw list of 1193 lemmas includes a substantial number of proper nouns and
statistical dust. Removing these reduces the list below 1100 words.
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ON NOT TEACHING GREEK 95
Morphology
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96 WILFRED E. MAJOR
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ON NOT TEACHING GREEK 97
Syntax
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98 WILFRED E. MAJOR
WILFRED E. MAJO
Louisiana State University
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