Why is the third declension such a black hole for students?

I started my fall Latin course absolutely to help my students succeed in understanding and using the third declension. I even broke a rule that's been repeated to me many times, which is not to distract students by telling them about grammar before you get to it in the book.

"Now, this is the first declension. You take the word's stem (which is self-evidently the same in both the nom. and gen. forms) and attach endings to it."

"By the way -- when you get to the third declension you will need to use the genitive stem, because it's different from the nominative stem.

"Hi, welcome back! Today we're going to talk about the second declension ... By the way ---" etc.

The third declension fell about halfway through the semester. What did they do? Wait for it ...

Over and over again, they took a few (randomly selected) letters off the end of the nominative stem and attached the third declension endings to it.

Readers, I introduced this new (but not unheard-of) concept so carefully. We looked at the endings and the new nouns separately. Then together. We discussed common patterns in third declension nouns. We drilled. We looked for third declension nouns in readings.

After we had reviewed about four times, it seemed clear that my students were going to have as much difficulty with it the seventh time as they did the first time.

I am told that this is a not uncommon reaction to the third declension, and I'm baffled. Would it be better to introduce this declension first? Is there a textbook that does that?

photo credit

Pin It

Teaching Koine?

As part of our continuing efforts to improve the Greek program, we are considering making Koine or Biblical Greek a larger part of our offerings at some point in the near future. The thinking is that this offers two advantages:

1) Koine is easier to learn, at least initially. We have a growing problem with students who won't (and perhaps don't know how) to put in the effort required to learn classical Greek.

2) Students interested in ministry have a vested interest in learning Greek well; a few students who are there for a practical purpose can raise the level of the whole class, we hope. (Not that learning Greek for its own sake is wrong or doesn't happen -- goodness no! -- but we get a lot of students who take Greek to 'feel smart' and then find that the challenges of first year have the exact opposite effect.)

Has anyone else started incorporating more Koine into their program? Is it something you would recommend?

(I should note that we are still planning to offer classical texts in second and third year. A student who learns classical Greek and then takes a course in lyric poetry has to become comfortable in a new dialect or dialects -- the same principle would seem to hold for a student who learn Koine and then reads Plato or Herodotus.)

photo credit

Pin It

What's the matter with Athenaze?

My SO is teaching first year Greek from a text called Athenaze. We have both taught from it before with decent results. This semester it's a nightmare. Students don't learn vocabulary, are clueless about endings, and never do the readings.

I would have said before this semester that Athenaze is a 'good but not great' book. The problem is that there is a fairly small number of Classical Greek textbooks out there (discounting the self-study and reprint-from-the-nineteenth-century options). Hansen and Quinn's chapters are too long, and Mastronarde doesn't have long enough reading passages. 

Athenaze's major problem, I believe, is one that affects all reading-based Latin and Greek textbooks: it has too much faith in its own method. If you believe that students can learn the grammar and vocabulary through reading, you shouldn't be afraid to make the grammar explanations hard to find. Athenaze seems to take the approach that if you make it hard enough to locate an actual explanation of the grammar, the students will say to themselves, "gosh, I guess I should try to figure it out from this nice little story here." 

I kid, of course. I realize the grammar is probably not deliberately hard to find. But the readings getting completely out of control in terms of length does seem to be purposeful. Okay, it is likely that a reading-based approach helps students read Greek more naturally and therefore more quickly. But students are also conditioned (by evaluations, by RateMyProfessors and similar sites) to be constantly on the lookout for 'unfairness.' Readings that are suddenly twice as long as they were a few weeks ago certainly fall under that category.

So, what to do? Someone should revise Chase and Philips (a barebones 1960s textbook that makes up in clarity for what it lacks in reading practice). Or make a separate grammar handbook for Athenaze.

Or students could learn to memorize better. Right.

Pin It