Greek Club

Thursday, January 14 – Today there was no Greek Club because not enough people showed up for the class. Only two came and I have to assume this is because people were preparing for midterms next week.

Thursday, 21 – Today there was no Greek Club because of midterms.

Thursday, 28 – I could not make it to Greek Club today because I had to go to the first meeting of the Astrometrica project I am participating in. Therefore I assigned the job of teaching to my student who had been in the club the longest. I had been planning on grooming this person for the position of Greek Club teacher next year since I would be graduating, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to show him what it’s like. I gave him a list of everything I wanted him to cover in the class period which simply consisted of a review. I wanted them to review all the declensions and conjugations they had done so far because people were just getting back from midterms and I knew they had probably forgotten some things. I also gave him a list of vocabulary words and told him to pass them out and inform the class to study them because next week we would be translating a passage that involved these words.

Thursday, February 4 – Today I interrogated my Greek Students about last week’s class and how well the teacher had done. They seemed to agree that overall he did a very good job and covered all the material I asked him to. I was very proud and I felt that he was a good pick for taking over Greek Club next year. After this discussion I reminded people of the vocabulary list they had received last week and then gave them the passage that went along with it. We ended up translating about half the passage in the time we had and I was pleased with this because I had not let them use their vocabulary but made them translate from memory. I did this not only because it would help them internalize the vocabulary but I felt that it would allow them to focus more on identifying the endings of the Greek words and making connections to declensions and conjugations. I told them we would continue translating next week.

Thursday, 11 – Today in Greek Club we continued translating the passage we had gotten half way through in the previous week. Some students came to the club today that had not been to the two previous classes and therefore had not gotten the vocabulary list and had not translated the first half of the passage with us. So I gave these people some Greek vocabulary books and assigned them the job of looking up any words that we got stuck on while translating. We were able to completely finish translating the passage and I was particularly pleased because I noticed a definite improvement in my students’ ability to translate even from just last week.