GREK V1101

Weekly ten minute quiz (no big deal if you go over stuff before) and daily translations. Two midterms and a final as well.

About 4 hours of homework per week, 4 or 5 quizzes over a semester, 2 or 3 tests, and a final.

It's ancient Greek - there's memorization homework that should be done pretty much every day. Tons of quizzes; generally reasonable amounts of written homework.

Ancient Greek is an amazingly difficult language. I had no clue what I was in for when I registered for this course. Memorization up the wazoo. It's ridiculous. You need to put in work before every class and keep up, or else it's just going to be harder. A minimum of 2 hrs spent on homework per class, plus a quiz every week (so that's an hour of studying). Plus reading the assigned sections from the chapters on our own (1/2 hour). Plus memorizing the forms and the vocab (1 hr). Add it all up, and it's completely ridiculous!! The homeworks are turned in once a week, but we go over the homework in class the other times so you have to do it -- otherwise, you'll look like a fool when you're called on (although Colin tries not to embarrass you too much when you struggle, he'll make you do the assigned translation on the spot -- which is pretty damned tough).

Good and bad. I take classics 60% for the languages, and 40% for the history. A teacher outght to be able to relate interesting background details as they Strengths: she is timely and meticulous in grading homework, quizzes and exams. They are _always_ returned by the following class. She is always available, and she does work hard to get the entire class involved. She knows the topic quite well, and is absolutely meticulous on syntax and accents. She will always offer reasonable explanations for all the exceptions to rules, which Greek is rife with. Weaknesses: she just doesn't have the chops yet to be considered a great teacher. She is young and it shows. She is not confident (yet) in her ability to teach. Her methods of involving the class are often tedious and boring. For instance, she will go around the room and have people read vocabulary, one word per person. Painful. Awkward. Each time she does it there is a nervous silence in the room because everyone dreads the 10 minutes to go thru it. She should instead focus on the very useful vocab notes that follow the vocab in the text. She will take a ton of time to write out the conjugation (paradigms) of verbs, instead of focusing on the themes of the verbs and the connecting points between tenses and voices. I've never had someone spend so much time on stuff that could be better compressed. She does not allow for enough int…

The king. If you have the chance to take Greek with Jose then you should take it.

A really wonderful teacher. She's incredibly patient and always willing to help outside of class. As the previous reviewer mentioned she makes handouts for every class and goes over everything that people have trouble with. It's still a really difficult class with a ton of work, but Susan does everything possible to help her students.

As one would expect, this class was focused on the fundamentals of Greek: basic vocab, grammar and syntax were the rule. A year in, you should have a really serious foundation. Professor Worman made this class worthwhile and surivavable. She's first-rate teacher, and this is a class that requires four hours of serious in-class teaching every week. On top of that, she was extremely approachable and was always willing to help. That she takes her students' learning very seriously was evident throughout, which is reflected in her grading (see below) and I am so glad that I took this course with her and not with a grad student. She seems to have a great deal of background in the linguistic history of Greek, and always had an interesting exegesis of the passages we read in the second semester. Finally, it helps that she's genuinely lovely and interesting person, as the material is somewhat grueling. Professor Worman, at least, assigned written homework every other class or so. It averaged 2-3 hours, and at one point in the first semester ballooned to 5-6, but she cut it down when we told her. There were also readings in the second semester which averaged about an hour of work. We normally had a quiz every two or three weeks and two tests over the course of the semester, although there are supposed to be three. There is also a final. Professor Worman is a very light grader, as she ca…

Professor Lougovaya was a great first semester ancient Greek teacher. She expects a lot but is very thorough and enthusiastic and lets you know when something will be hard and when you should know it really, really well. 99% of the time I thought her quizzes were well-timed and very helpful. If I could have her second semester as well, I definitely would.

Colin is a fantastic instructor. Without a doubt the best language instructor I have ever had (and I've taken *a lot* of language courses). He is also by far the most demanding language instructor I have ever had. We had to read the book on our own -- he made his own lessons for the material covered, and his own worksheets. That's a good thing, since we learned the same material from two perspectives. But it doubles the work for us. Ancient Greek requires *tons* of memorization, and Colin tries to show us patters (and drills them into us) so that we can reduce our workload a bit. He also makes quizzes and exams very predictable, so we know exactly what to make sure we've memorized. Otherwise, it would just be too much. The only negative was that we didn't get a chance to do much translating from actual Greek -- we almost always [with one exception] skipped over the selections from Plato, etc., in the textbook, and we never got a chance to do some "real" translating at the end. Much of that was because we had to cancel several class periods [snowstorms, illness (once)] didn't have enough time. At least we got through the whole textbook, which apparently isn't always the case. He mentioned that he really wanted us to get our feet wet with some translating, and was sorry we were not able to -- so it shouldn't be a problem with future classes unless you also have several classes c…