Okay, well I might not throw a full-blown party, but I'm really proud of my students in the Intro to New Testament Greek class. Not only are they mastering the theological concepts brought out by the Greek language in the biblical text, but they're really grasping the Greek language in just three weeks! For every test the students need to know six theological essays (in English--thank God!) out of which I randomly pick two (30 points each). Then they have ten sentences in Greek to translate into English (4 points each). We just had our first exam last week and 3/4 of the class scored 90 and higher. Ex-cell-ent! We're even at the point now of reading some basic verses from the New Testament. And the students aren't geeks. Several jocks are taking the course and some socially cool people. Eight of them are business majors, three math, two biochemistry, two psych, two english, and or course there are some theology majors, namely four, and assorted others.
Bottom line, the vast majority of the class is kicking some serious butt when it comes to learning Greek. I think they're even beginning to appreciate how Greek enables them to think critically about how things relate to one another and the necessity of articulating those relationships clearly and accurately. In English we have one word "the." Greek has eight ways to express the concept "the," and then does so three times over because there are three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Imagine memorizing twenty-four different "the's"!
And the students in my other classes are great as well, but ya just gotta love somebody who can say "the" twenty-four different ways and not just say "duh."
Bottom line, the vast majority of the class is kicking some serious butt when it comes to learning Greek. I think they're even beginning to appreciate how Greek enables them to think critically about how things relate to one another and the necessity of articulating those relationships clearly and accurately. In English we have one word "the." Greek has eight ways to express the concept "the," and then does so three times over because there are three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Imagine memorizing twenty-four different "the's"!
And the students in my other classes are great as well, but ya just gotta love somebody who can say "the" twenty-four different ways and not just say "duh."
2 comments:
Your Greek class sounds really cool! Should I take it? I think I would be ahead because I'm in a sorority and I already know all the letters.
I really enjoyed your class last semester. I learned tons and it was really interesting too.
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