Elizabeth Scharffenberger

If you want your Greek to improve, take a class with Prof Scharffenberger. If you want to feel confident and comfortable translating, digesting, and analyzing 1000+ lines of text per week, take survey with her. She KNOWS her stuff. She is well organized, punctual, fair, and extremely demanding - but in a way that is positive and constructive for the student. My weakest point was having the confidence [and honestly, the skill] to discuss the material, especially in such a small class, but Prof Scharffenberger was kind and did not put anyone on the spot. There were no surprises. She was accommodating with her office hours, offered guidance for writing the two short papers, and in addition to discussing the text, gave some brief grammar and meter lessons. Also, it was great to walk into class and be greeted by her smiling and being excited to start the lesson. Small things like that really change the atmosphere of a classroom.

This class was a disappointment. Scharffenberger's seminar model is broken. In a normal class (as I have experienced it), discussion passes from student A to student B and so on. In this class, it passes from student A to Scharffenberger to student B to Scharffenberger and so on. This has several effects. It slows the class down. Since Scharffenberger talks after every student, the class drags slowly. If a student talks for a minute, and Scharffenberber talks for a minute, then it takes twice as long as it should to call on student B after student A is called on. There would regularly be ques of 5 or more students waiting to speak. By the time you are called on your point is obsolete. This is a result of her second problem. She doesn't seem interested in what you have to say. Like most other CC professors, Scharffenberger comes to class with some points prepared. These are her points, and she makes sure to hit them in every one of her responses, regardless of what the student was talking about. Since she was constantly changing the subject back to her own topics, the class couldn't generate any sory of compicated discussion, since the discussion was abandoned by Scharffenberger before it could be expanded upon by the students. This happened every day, multiple times a day, and it leads to the final problem with her seminar system. It makes her seem dumb. Now Scharffenberger is…

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.

Professor Scharffenberger was a delightful woman teaching a very difficult class. Assigning an absurd number of lines a night, she always had to adjust the readings to more manageable lengths. Given the number of lines expected for each class, it became incredibly time consuming to write out a translation for every assignment - something she may do on purpose since she prefers students to translate from the Latin with prepared notes on vocabulary and grammar instead of translations. Studying for tests and quizzes can be frustrating as they each cover hundreds of lines, and while each quiz is short, if you did not study the two lines out of a hundred that she picked, it feels like you might as well have not studied at all. That being said, if you put in the time and the work, you can do well in this class - Professor Scharffenberger is a fair grader and all the problems I had in this class were with the language Latin and not the professor. If you are a Classics major, take a course with Professor Scharffenberger, if you're taking Latin to fulfill the language requirement you can definitely find an easier professor.

Prof Scharffenberger is one of my favourite teachers in my career as a student. She not only listens to ANYTHING anyone has to say, she also is never condescending...she is very open minded, and is a sweetheart. I would go to her office hours just to chat. She definitely wants to see you push yourself and she sees the potential in you. I would highly recommend her to anyone! She is very knowledgeable, knows ancient greek and some latin. She is open to learning/incite students have. Also, she does not sit and talk the whole 2 hours of class, she promotes CLASS discussions. Definitely go to her office hours to discuss a paper/let her know what you are writing about because she always has that one piece of info that you hadn't thought about, or that one insight you may want to pay a little more attention to, etc...she's really great to brainstorm with :)

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Prof. Scharfenberger really did seem nice, but it quickly became frustrating because of the situaiton below: you want to like a class, you do all the readings and get to class with your little highlighter and post-its, ready to snap up any juicy tidbit of information that might come your way .. and then the lecture devolves into people talking about their personal favorite pets or what they had for breakfast, with the professor acting really "supportive" of this choice to waste everyone's time. truly, did want to like it. but really, it wasn't good.

Professor Scharffenberger is as terrific as her name is long. In addition to being extremely outgoing and kind, she is perhaps the perfect union (along with several other Columbia/Barnard classicists) of a the skills of a brilliant literary mind and a rigorous linguist. She is not only about touchy-feely literary criticism, and not only concerned with nuances of grammar, instead she mixes the two to make a great and varied class. She knows Greek extremely well, and this means that you must know it also in order to succeed on her exams. Another Classics professor once remarked to me, "She is such a good teacher it makes me want to jump out of the window."

Much of what other reviewers have said is correct: Scharffenberger is very nice, extremely approachable, learned everyone's names, and encouraged discussion. She is not, however, a great professor. I learned virtually nothing in her class, which was wasted listening to the often inane comments of students who liked to hear their own voices. Discussion is fine, but not when lecture is sacrificed for it and not when the professor is unwilling or unable to tell someone he or she is wrong. Furthermore, when Scharffenberger did lecture, she offered virtually nothing in the way of in depth analysis and admitted that she had not studied this material for 20 years. While it was fun to read Euripides and Aeschylus, I can do that on my own. If you want an easy A, this is the class for you. If you want to learn something, I've heard that Steiner teaches this class with more scholarly rigor.

Through this course I gained the ability to parse larger Greek texts, was made familiar with idiomatic phrases, and how to step beyond the basic translation and think more deeply on the text.

How to moderate a class at a higher level. keep discussions flowing for 120 minutes. Reach out to everybody especially in a class where there are varied interest from different students. The essence of dialogues, working with each other and incorporating the interests of everybody in decision making.