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Seumas Macdonald
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What's New at SeumasU, Jan 2025 edition
I've held off writing this for a few reasons, but time is running out on me. Firstly, I enjoyed a summer holiday here in Australia, and did my best not to work. That was successful, but now it's time for me to return from sun and
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100 simple stories
I know that you are used to me announcing projects and not exactly completing them. It's a character flaw. I'm working on it.Over on my patreon I have begun releasing, one a week, short 100-ish word stories. These stories are composed with very restricted
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Changes in my Athenaze-sequence classes for 2025
χαίρετε πάντες! After 5 years of teaching students their way through Athenaze in an online environment, I've become very familiar with the book and its main narrative, and I've taught a lot of people all the way through both volumes now. In 2025, as part of
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Explaining cases as jobs with tasks
Not the most inspiring title for a blog post, I know. Yesterday I was beginning to explain grammatical case to some new students, and it's the first time many of them have dealt with this concept at all, and my teaching method with them so far hasn'
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On the norms of the language we teach
A little while back I became involved in a discussion about whether it was okay to use/teach people to use the 2nd person negative aorist imperatives. E.g. is it okay to teach learners to say μὴ φάγε or similar. This is the kind of thing that should be
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SeumasU, term 4 (October) classes,
and a sneak peak at plans for 2025.. The introductory sequence of Greek is six-courses covering Athenaze books 1 and 2. Next term I’m offering: 101, 102, 103, 104, 106 For Greek advanced courses, we'll be reading Thucydides book 1. For Latin, I am delighted to
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Individual tutoring slots available
Just to let my readers know that I now have some more slots available for individual 1-to-1 tutoring. If you'd like to accelerate your Latin or Ancient Greek studies, or work on a particular text or area or skill-set, I'm open to finding
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In-person Greek class, October 2024!
It's been a very long time since I've taught Greek in-person. Before the coronavirus. But it's going to happen. When? Monday nights, 7:30pm-9:30pm, for 10 weeks starting October 14th. Where? Lane Cove Anglican Church, Sydney, Australia. (please don't
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Upcoming classes in July, 2024
It's time for a new round of classes here at SeumasU! This term I have the usual gambit of introductory Greek, not so much Latin (sorry! it's a demand issue not a supply one), and then some nice upper courses. The introductory sequence of Greek is
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ἠγέρθη - he's up
Students of mine will know my predilection to call the θη forms of the so-called 'aorist passive' instead 'theta-eta middles'. In today's post, I want to explore how this understanding of the middle helps us make better sense of biblical texts. In
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A Greek Patristics masterclass?
I just want to float the idea here of something I have tried more than once to get up and running, but never really gotten the uptake. But essentially I would really love to get a reading-group / masterclass going that read Greek Patristic texts. It's hard work