Reflections on teaching Greek 102

Now that semester two is finally wrapped up across my diverse colleges, it seems an apt time to write some reflections on teaching Intro to Koine Greek 2.

At the start of semester I was met with a conundrum - zero of my students were face-to-face. It was to be all distance, all asynchronous. Hmm, what to do?

I'd also been talking to James Tauber, of course, about many things Greek, digital, and pedagogical. We've been talking for some time about how to sequence Greek pericopes by 'least new vocab', and also about reading environments. In my context, I was partly hamstrung by the need to provide video'd lectures tied to powerpoint slides, but through semester one I'd at least become accustomed to that.

So, I tried something new. I took our current sequence of pericopes, and I taught these texts one by one through the semester, 'talking through' each text. It was more grammar-driven than I'd like in other contexts, but I couldn't see a way around that given the parameters. It was very interesting though.

We read almost entirely Johannine texts, 'out of order', even at times reading the back half of a chapter right before the front half. Early on the vocab is quite limited, and Johannine texts are wonderfully (pedagogically speaking) repetitive. They repeat not only key words, but phrases, and structures. Sure, we met things in the first week that textbook students wouldn't see for months, but we were dealing with real Greek, and the number of exposures both to forms and to structures was very high. And as we went to each new text, the same elements would reappear again and again, just with a few new features, a few new words.

At the end of semester, we'd covered more Greek text than I think any comparable first year (New Testament Greek) course or textbook does. Our word count was high, but our vocabulary count was somewhat lower, though still covering a solid core. And I have no doubt that the repetition numbers were much, much higher.

I think this could be improved upon. And I think it could be made more CI-based, communicatively driven. If the first half of the course had gone better, or if students had a more active grasp of Greek, then a sequenced reading of texts could also be matched with discussion in Greek of those texts.