The last time I stood before an APA meeting and introduced Anne Groton I had the distinct privilege of handing watching her earn her well deserved APA Teaching Award. When not involved with student productions of ancient comedy (a passion of hers since her undergraduate days at Wellesley, A.B. '76, and her graduate days in Ann Arbor, Ph.D. '82), Anne Groton spends much of her time teaching courses in Latin and Greek at St. Olaf College, where she is an Associate Professor of Classics. She has much in common with Connie Rodgriguez, for they both believe that if we need a particular bit of pedagogical material and it does not exist, the only answer is to write it yourself. This first led to 38 Latin Stories, the reader she and her colleague Jim May published ten years ago as a supplement to Wheelock. Buoyed by its success, she tells me that she "rashly undertook to write an elementary Greek textbook during her 1990-91 sabbatical," an effort that eventually led to From Alpha to Omega: A Beginning Course in Classical Greek, which is the subject of Anne's talk today.
No doubt about it: it's a baby boom. Everywhere you look, you see another Beginning Greek textbook being born! Besides my own screaming infant, From Alpha to Omega, which wins the prize for the corniest name, we now have, among others, Balme & Lawall's Athenaze, Hansen & Quinn's Greek: An Intensive Course, Groten--no relation!--and Finn's A Basic Course for Reading Attic Greek, Mastronarde's Introduction to Attic Greek, Mollin & Williamson's An Introduction to Ancient Greek, Reiner's Ancient Gr eek Alive, Williams' Elementary Classical Greek, J.A.C.T.'s Reading Greek, Seligson's Greek for Reading, Schoder & Horrigan's A Reading Course in Homeric Greek, Wright's revised version of Pharr's Homeric Greek--and that's not the end of the list. These more recent arrivals join an old and venerable family that includes Allen's First Year of Greek, Crosby & Schaeffer's An Introduction to Greek, and Chase & Phillips' A New Introduction to Greek, all of them white-haired but still vigorously in print.
With so many elementary Greek textbooks suddenly available, do we Greek teachers have reason to rejoice and sing, alleluia, the strife is o'er, or to assume that the battle--even half of it--is won? Alas, no. Choosing the book that seems best for us and for our students is only the beginning of the challenge; it's just the Alpha, light-years away from the Omega. How we use that precious and costly book makes all the difference in the world. In the remaining minutes I'd like to discuss just a few of the ways in which a willing and able professor can accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative (well, at least make a stab at eliminating the negative!) in the Greek textbook with which I'm most familiar, namely, my own.
Students at Saint Olaf College take Beginning Greek not just to satisfy the college's foreign language requirement but also to satisfy their curiosity about a subject reputed to be both fascinating and demanding. Often, however, the course proves to be even more demanding than they had expected, and it is only by emphasizing the fascinating nature of the language, along with the rewards that come from knowing it inside and out, that we can convince our students to persevere. That so many of them survive the first year and go on to Intermediate and Advanced Greek is due in part to how comfortable they feel with the textbook. That level of comfort, however, does not come automatically; it is not enough for the instructor to point to a page in the book and say, "Learn this for tomorrow." Students need to be shown how to learn from the textbook; they need to have demonstrated to them, again and again, what the textbook and what the course as a whole have to offer them; they need to be persuaded, d ay after day, that the time they spend on Greek is not just valuable but invaluable.
In recent years I have heard teachers assert that giving students a positive experience in a beginning Greek course is more crucial than teaching them Greek. Now, I realize that students who have grown up on fast food may prefer that their courses all be equivalent to McDonald's Happy Meals. But is it really impossible for students to learn Greek grammar and have a positive experience at the same time? Was Fobes, the author of Philosophical Greek, right when he wrote in the preface of his daunting textbook, "I cannot promise you Greek without tears"? I think it would have been more accurate for him to write, "I cannot promise you Greek without sweat," but neither prospect--that of tears or of sweat--is likely to attract students to take Greek. What does attract them is a desire to read Homer or Herodotus or Euripides or Plato or the New Testament in the original language, or sometimes simply a desire to try something out of the ordinary. What makes them stick with it, even in the face of ne gative peer pressure and outright disapproval from unenlightened parents, is the satisfaction they get from exercising their brains, cracking the code, gaining admittance to a magical land of exotic sounds and syntax.
If I am starting to sound mystical, it is only because in today's lackadaisical, lowest-common-denominator, path-of-least-resistance world, students' motivation to work hard cannot be taken for granted; in general, it's safe to assume that students come to a course with some motivation to learn but no motivation at all to expend huge amounts of effort. Thus it falls to the teacher to be, if not a cheerleader, at least a role model of someone for whom hard work is a joy. I find myself constantly giving encouragement to my Greek students, constantly pointing out to them how thrilled they should be about all that they are learning, constantly trying to awake in them a curiosity not just about language but about history, art, philosophy, religion, science, in short, the liberal arts. When you're studying Greek, I tell them, you're actually studying life--in all its moods, tenses, voices, and aspects. "Yeah, sure," the students say, snorting and rolling their eyes and nudging one another knowingly, but they come back ten years later as alumni and tell me I was right.
Some authors have chosen to weave Greek history and culture into their language textbooks, and I must admit that those books, with their numerous maps and illustrations, are very attractive and informative and perhaps make it easier for the teach er to interest his or her students in the ancient world. On the other hand, they tend to assume that students are not in a hurry to learn the fundamentals of Greek grammar. At Saint Olaf we are always in a rush: we retain many of our Greek students for just three semesters (the extent of the language requirement), yet we want them to have the experience of reading an ancient work in the original before they leave us. Moreover, because of the college's schedule, we cannot meet more often than three tim es per week. Thus we are forever struggling to complete all of the basics in a year's time so that students will be prepared to read Plato in their third semester.
For us, the ideal textbook is one that concentrates on grammar, has short chapters with a limited number of vocabulary words, and includes reading passages of gradually increasing length and difficulty in each chapter. I wrote From Alpha to Omega with those desiderata in mind. The book presents material in bite-sized chunks: each of the fifty chapters is short enough to be covered in just one day or two or three. Teachers may choose to cover all of the book in one intensive course, all of it in one year, or all of it in the space of three semesters. Its flexibility makes it suitable for more than one type of academic calendar and more than one type of student. To strike a balance between tough, in terms of standards, and tender, in terms of tone, I opted not to "dumb down" my explanations of grammar but nevertheless to make the readings less formidable by using adapted rather than "real," unaltered passages. For the first half of the book, I limited myself to Aesop's fables, some of the more humorous and unusual ones; for the last twenty-five chapters I selected readings from the Bible, Demosthenes, Xenophon, Thucydides, Lysias, Arrian, Aristotle, and Plato.
I have found, to my dismay, that my carefully worded explanations, designed to assist students with no background in language and make Greek less intimidating for them, often overwhelm them. "There's so much there, we can't tell what's most impo rtant" is their chronic complaint. I've learned over the years to allocate more time in class for introducing each new chapter and highlighting its most significant ideas before I send the students away to read and digest it for themselves. I then review the concepts at the start of the next class period. This of course cuts into the time available for drilling and doing the translation exercises. One way to cope with this dilemma is to have the students write out their homework so that it can be handed in and corrected if there is not enough time in class to go over it all. At Saint Olaf we collect the homework assignment every day and give students credit for completing it; this policy leads to more productive class sessions with the students better prepared than they would otherwise have been. We also honor our best senior Classics majors by giving them the responsibility of running a "Greek lab" every Tuesday and Thursday evening, where Beginning Greek students can go to get more practice and a healthy dose of moral support. It has apparently become traditional for students to spend part of every lab imitating and telling funny stories about the Saint Olaf Classics professors--behavior that we don't frown upon, since it contributes to the esprit de corps that we try to cultivate around the department, and since, after all, we are pretty funny.
Students usually enjoy the readings in the textbook, yet those in the latter half are quite difficult, as are the made-up sentences to be translated from Greek to English or English to Greek. Some of the sentences, particularly the ones I composed in the wee hours of the morning, are, I admit, a bit on the bizarre side. Colleagues have even accused me of promoting a life of crime because so many of my sentences concern thievery: "They hasten out of the sea and steal the tents." "Man, are you stealing stones out of the market? Do you wish to harm the roads?" But even sentences as wacky as these, and especially the readings in the second half of the book, can serve as excellent springboards for discussion about ancient Greek society. Since the book has no sections devoted specifically to history or culture and no illustrations to capture the students' imagination, it is up to the teacher to fill in the gaps--or perhaps have the students themselves fill in the gaps with individual or group reports on this or that topic. Instructors are welcome to customize the book by creating their own supplemental exercises or by introducing additional or alternative readings that better fit the goals of their program.
Even with a book that I wrote expressly for the Saint Olaf academic calendar and with the help provided by Richard Wevers' IBM-compatible software accompanying the text, our students have trouble absorbing all of the information in such a short ti me, and even with the reading passages they still, after a long summer of forgetfulness, struggle with the transition to original Greek in the third semester. We have considered slowing down and using part of the third semester for finishing the textbook, but it's appealing, especially for our seniors, to cover all the grammar in a year. A Greek maintenance program that students could do on their own over the summer, or a review course that they could take during the interval between terms, would help them make the transition from one course to the next and especially from first- to second-year Greek. I believe that Dale Grote is developing a summer Greek review course for students who have finished From Alpha to Omega. They would then be able to move smoothly from Groton to Grote (losing just one final syllable!).
Learning Greek is never going to be easy for our students, nor is teaching it to them ever going to be easy, either. In an age that sees little, if any, reason to look back at the past, teachers of a dead language face a daily struggle. The title of this talk may have given you the impression that I regard the writing of a textbook as a panacea for all the ills besetting our profession: simply write the textbook, and the students will come. Well, yes, they will come, out of curiosity to get a look at the lady who wrote the book! But the vital question is, will they stay? We are lucky to have available to us so many different textbooks and so many different approaches, from which we are free to choose the one that best suits us, our school, and the students we teach. With the right book and the right strategies, we can ensure that our students stay in our classrooms, deriving the greatest possible benefit and the greatest possible delight from their study of Greek.
