Intermediate Greek: Prose · Classics
Keep up with the reading because she'll call randomly on you. Be able to parse and explain every word on the quizzes and tests. Quizzes, midterm, and final. According to my transcript about 40% of the class got in the A range.
30% midterm, 30% final, 20% weekly quizzes, 20% Participation
Weekly (Friday) Quizzes (drop the lowest quiz at the end of the semester), for the first quarter of the semester on morphology and syntax, later on also translation in addition to specific questions on morphology and syntax, Homework assignments (on syntax and morphology) due every Monday; translation preparation required as homework for every class. At first the work seemed intimidating (probably because we all had the summer off from Greek), but you soon adjust and the workload is reasonable. Fair grading on quizzes and homeworks are corrected, but graded only for completion.
N.B. for Classics students reading the above reviews: they may be perfectly true, but are not at all related to her skills as a Greek teacher. She is excellent at explaining grammatical concepts and is always willing to answer questions during the readings, and I would definitely recommend her intermediate Greek class. She does work you a lot, but not insanely.
Daily translations, (Plato's Ion and 500ish lines of Hesiod's Theogony), 2 short (2-3 page) response papers, midterm, final.
Daily homeworks will leave you banging your head on the wall at 4AM, but worth it. Stick with it! Verb Synopses which ended after a month. Quiz every Friday. Midterm, Final.
A good professor who will discuss Plato in interesting but not mind-blowing ways. She's glad to digress, very helpful while you're translating, and you get major points for translating the Greek literally. She is obsessed with Greek grammar. Know your conditionals, indirect question, indirect statement, objective/subjective genitive. If writing an essay, realize that she cares more about your translating and interpretation of the Greek than anything else. Absorb the main concepts from the secondary literature, but don't waste too much time on them. The Greek is what she cares about.
I really enjoyed this class with Paraskevi! She is incredibly knowledgeable about Ancient Greek, both in terms of language and culture. She is not the most organized in terms of grading, but is very fair when she gets around to it.
Professor Scharffenberger was absolutely fantastic. I went into the class having not taken Beginning Ancient Greek at Columbia, unlike the majority of my peers, but fortunately I ended up being adequately prepared from my background at my previous school. She is very warm, funny, and knows her material very well. She also made sure that people got any questions in they needed to be answered. She is very good and clear at explaining grammar, and every once in a while we'll contextualize the text and discuss content as well as grammar. She calls on people randomly, and it's a small class, so you won't get away with not doing the homework, although that should be true of most classics classes. I looked forward to going to her classes and learned a lot. The plethora of homeworks and quizzes ensure that you are constantly updated on your status in the class and on what you do and don't understand. Overall, I learned a lot of Greek, and will keep an eye out for her classes in the future.
Folch is good, but demanding. Very demanding. One may even say that he is good because he is demanding, or that he is demanding because he is good. Either way do not expect an easy ride. I took Greek 1201 with Folch and 1202 with Foley simultaneously (which I do not recommend for the sane) and found 1201 harder. Significantly harder! Expect quizzes on grammar, vocabulary, and translation. Be prepared to draw your vocab words! They were irregularly scheduled but he gave fair warning, all three of ours were on Fridays and he let us know in class on Tuesday. He assigned long secondary readings in English and short response papers. His syllabus originally called for five of these but in the end we only did two with a third optional for extra credit. I don't think he really cared about them and don't imagine him assigning as many of these in the future. Strangely enough we never got them back! Any of them! He probably had enough papers to grade from the CC section he was teaching simultaneously. Midterm like the quizzes but longer. Don't expect a choice on the passage to translate! He allowed each of us to ask him two questions (vocab, grammar, whatever) during the course of the exam. Final was a longer midterm, although he allowed us to select two passages, one each from Plato and Hesiod, of four to translate. Be careful the final is cumulative as far as the translation goes, thou…