The alarm cued the start of the morning and with a slap of the snooze function, my retreat back to restful bliss.
My first Greek class was coming up, first period of the morning. Sleeping was a better thing in my mind.
Beep Beep Beep!
Slap!
This repeated several more times until I rousted myseld and readied for the day's activities.
With much trepidation I jogged to Founder's Hall. Grabbing a gulp of water before venturing to room 245, I purposely situated myself in a mass of students because that is exactly opposite my normal routine.
Wanted to be different today.
The first lesson was simple: the difference and history of the words pedagogy and andragogy. The class is an andragogy course. Its for adults--the apparent difference between the two words that can mean "to teach" is that one has the connotation of being the teaching of children (peda) while the other is adults (andra) particularly adult males.
The male bit aside--the feminine sex is represented on the class roster--his point was well made: I won't hold your hand. I'll teach you and give you everything you need--even meet with you to explain things outside of class--but you must be your own advocate and motivator.
Good. Its nice to be treated like an adult.
So, with that in mind he skipped most of the syllabus, hitting only a few highlights and jumped into teaching us how to sing the Greek alphabeta. (ha).
I found myself having a good enough time but nervous nonetheless.
Particularly when I learned why our book wasn't the Mounce 'Basics of Greek Grammar.'
Our book was of the inductive style of learning, giving the student only enough to start then requiring them to learn by doing.
Mounce, a deductive text, gives you everything before you do anything.
I've always assumed I would be a deductive learner when it came to Greek. So it was that i left the class feeling that apprehension rise again.
Was I going to find my text book useless?
Would I need to drop the 40 bucks to get Mounce to understand my mandatory text?
Several hours later found me in the library basement, tucked away happily as a scribe of old--barring the tilted desk--pouring over my text.
Happy. No, giddy. I was giddy. Completely unexpected but I like learning Greek. So much so I found it refreshing. I had fun making up Mneumonic rules for the grammar paradigms. The one sad thing was the knowledge my good friend Kevin Reed would be loving it too and he isn't here.
So, while its too early to tell whether I really like the study of Koine Greek, I can say for certain it was a great first date even if she was a little dead.
Josh
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This is a great post! You are a good writer, honey. I am so glad you like Greek. Hope the second date is as good as the first!
ReplyDeleteDear Josh:
ReplyDeleteI love your writing too but proof read man, proof read--your a writer not a sluggard. There's lots of typos in these wonderful essays. That being said, look at a regular bookstore for a book on sentence diagraming for dummies. Or something that shows very basically how to diagram sentences. it is very fun and you must know how to do it to date dead launguage girls--I mean understanding sentence parts well enough to do basic diagraming will really help. I will be happy to give you a little refresher in April but that isn't soon enough. We can do stuff on gmail chat though.
Eh???
This is Kevin.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, I would love to learn ancient Greek. I've spent much energy learning German. Alas, I have nobody to exercise this skill with.
Ironic, but your developing skill in a dead language should see more application than mine has with a live one. I do not regret learning German, however. I would do it all again for the mere enjoyment of it. Perhaps a dead language lies in my future yet.