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# Post-mortem of a koine greek class
- URL: https://thepatrologist.com/post-mortem-of-a-koine-greek-class/
- Published: 2026-10-20T20:00:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-20T20:00:57.000Z
- Author: Seumas Macdonald

This last semester I taught a "proper" introduction to NT Greek class for the first time in years. It was "Greek 2", and it was designed to cover the second half of Duff's textbook. I don't normally teach "new testament Greek" as a thing, and I don't normally teach in a college/university like-setting, so here is me giving you some live post-action reporting.

Like many teaching situtions that I find myself in, much of this was not of my own creation. I was brought in as a relatively last-minute instructor, only got access to the syllabus to rewrite it about two weeks before semester began, and inherited students who had already been using Duff. The class was small, and online.

Duff may not be the worst textbook, but it is certainly the worst Greek textbook I've ever 'used'. Duff's goal is to teach you *the bare minimum and only the minimum to enable to you translate New Testament passages*. That's why he eschews accents (but not breathings?), and leaves all sorts of things out that probably belong in a first-year grammar textbook. His grammatical treatments oversimplify, occasionally misrepresent, and in some cases are simply wrong (mostly outdated). In terms of imagined pedagogy, I think Duff expects you to do all the usual Grammar-Translation things: memorise the vocab and grammar rules, and then apply them like alchemy: the vocab is your raw resources, the grammar is your magic, and the transformation is turning Greek sentences into English ones, and vice versa.

What to do with such a textbook? How to teach from it? Well, I ended up in something of a hybrid position, and I think that's the best I could manage in the situation. It's hard to shift students who have started with one pedagogical method to embrace another, and harder still when there are certain "inherited givens" in a course.

I did mostly jettison actually teaching Duff, presenting them instead with grammatical overviews drawn from my own years of teaching but covering the same ground. That meant, for example, that my students were given a much more up-to-date treatment of aspect and voice, which are two main areas that older books just are wrong about. 

I tried, too, to have them read sections of my Galilaiathen reader, and to teach some basic Greek sentence-based-questions, to at least move them towards a more communicative approach. I think in this I was hampered by overall time available.

Beyond that, I encouraged the reading of as much comprehensible NT greek as possible.

I think one of the problems with all university-style language courses is the factor of time. And I have long thought the following about it, and written as much here and there. In what I think of as a 'standard' college type program, a notional 3-hours of contact with an instructor is meant to mean a further 9 hours of individual study, for 12 total hours per week. That's what the handbooks lay out for humanities subjects. That's why 4 subjects should be a full-time load, because that would be a 48-hour week. Sure, no arts student is doing that, but anyway. Of course, in the sciences the expected independent study time is less, because you are filling up more of the notional 12 hours with labs and pracs and so on.

Language shouldn't be timetabled like other humanities subjects. It should fill up those 12 hours with language activities: reading, listening, watching (a/v material), conversing, and some writing. Those hours should be communicative. In my ideal world, actually teaching explicit grammar is probably the smallest slice of those 12 hours, and it's not using "prime teacher time", it's off-loaded to students working through grammatical explanations on their own time and then bringing questions to the instructor. Instructor-led time is best used for in-language communicative work.

Of course, funding this is also likely impossible. But if you were a student who wanted to learn Greek, I would tell you to spend your 9 hours outside of class building a communicative eco-system to let you do this anyway.

Anyway, to return to my particular class, there was simply no way I felt capable of reframing or recasting the course to do this kind of work, and so it was left to us to do the best with what we had: a bit of communicative work, a better framework for understanding grammar, enough exposure to meaningful texts to keep progressing, and hopefully some useful tools for ongoing acquisition.

### Assessment

I mostly hate assessments in formal education. I have a philosophical and pedagogical prejudice against them, informed by reading a few books on the topic, to the point that I mostly consider them a relatively-useless imposition by external forces. I won't go in to making the case against most assessment here, but I consider it largely pointless. Nevertheless, it must be done. So I took the syllabus I inherited, and tweaked it slightly as best I could. That mostly meant replacing two tasks with oral assessments. 

In hindsight, having the second half of their oral final be an unseen passage was probably too demanding, or at least too demoralising. Especially since I did not give them the benefit of any vocab helps on less familiar words. I suppose it is like the experience of getting to the end of *Athenaze*, feeling like you've learnt all this Greek, then they give you the Acharnians and you don't understand any of it. It's not very nice to open up a random NT passage and realise you struggle to make heads or tails of it.

At the same time, perhaps it is a humbling reminder (to put a positive spin on it?) that for all your progress, you are still yet a beginner in the language and there is a long slope ahead of you.

These students, and they were wonderful and diligent ones, eager to learn, had by my calculations 72 contact hours of Greek over two semesters (so, only the second 36 with me). To contrast with my own students, if you had 72 contact hours with me you've finished all of Athenaze and taken an extra course as well, and you've spent those 72 hours being spoken to in Greek and responding. Are all my Greek students fluent speakers or readers? No. But they have all experienced a lot more hours *in language*. 

### Would I do it again?

I don't know. Perhaps with more control over curriculum design. Give me 36 hours to talk Greek at students and off-load the outside class time to grammar and to extensive reading, and we could get a lot further though. I think that's my take-away. Even within the confines of this system, there are ways we could change the structure of learning to increase the acquisition available.