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Today has been awesome.
Okay. Not the part where I had trouble sleeping again. Or waking up feeling all sorts of queasy. Or the hideous heat that I keep needing to walk through. Or that I forgot to bring any caffeine to class. Those parts? Not so awesome.
But other than that...
Greek class is now a tutor and two students. Two hours of intent focus, sitting across a table from the guy with the chalk. (I may see if I have some colored chalk to bring in to class tomorrow; he kept being frustrated by the all-white nature of the tools at hand.) He's taking a firmly linguistic approach, which should help enormously, because as he points out, a lot of the "irregular" aspects of Greek are actually following perfectly understandable rules, which just happen to be phonetic ones that most classes don't teach.
We ended up with a giant vowel chart on the board, and mapping out all the fun things like dental voiced fricatives and what not: a lot of the changes that happen in words make a lot more sense when you can look at that chart and see how one area is sort of dragging the other toward it. I'm not sure how well I'd be following if I hadn't taken Intro to Linguistics before, but since I have, it made an awful lot of sense.
In any case, we were let free at eleven with stern injunctions to memorize all of second declension (masculine and neuter) and all the vocab listed in the first actually-containing-vocab chapter of the book. My classmate helped me find both the place to fill out the paperwork to get back the tuition for the canceled original class (a surprisingly easy process!) and the hidden Zen/Taco Cabana/Chick-Fil-A nook on campus. We ended up having lunch together, and talking about climbing (...seriously, does everyone here climb rocks, and I just didn't realize before) and modern Christianity's issues. Which was interesting!
Then I bought a Greek-English dictionary and a backpack, and walked home in the horrible horrible horrible heat. Seriously. It is horrible. It is bright and sunny and has hit three digits. I'd actually really like to go climbing today, but walking to the bus stop in this heat... Ugh. Maybe I'll do my homework for now, and think about climbing tomorrow.
If I can just keep up with the memorization, this summer is going to be awesome.
Okay. Not the part where I had trouble sleeping again. Or waking up feeling all sorts of queasy. Or the hideous heat that I keep needing to walk through. Or that I forgot to bring any caffeine to class. Those parts? Not so awesome.
But other than that...
Greek class is now a tutor and two students. Two hours of intent focus, sitting across a table from the guy with the chalk. (I may see if I have some colored chalk to bring in to class tomorrow; he kept being frustrated by the all-white nature of the tools at hand.) He's taking a firmly linguistic approach, which should help enormously, because as he points out, a lot of the "irregular" aspects of Greek are actually following perfectly understandable rules, which just happen to be phonetic ones that most classes don't teach.
We ended up with a giant vowel chart on the board, and mapping out all the fun things like dental voiced fricatives and what not: a lot of the changes that happen in words make a lot more sense when you can look at that chart and see how one area is sort of dragging the other toward it. I'm not sure how well I'd be following if I hadn't taken Intro to Linguistics before, but since I have, it made an awful lot of sense.
In any case, we were let free at eleven with stern injunctions to memorize all of second declension (masculine and neuter) and all the vocab listed in the first actually-containing-vocab chapter of the book. My classmate helped me find both the place to fill out the paperwork to get back the tuition for the canceled original class (a surprisingly easy process!) and the hidden Zen/Taco Cabana/Chick-Fil-A nook on campus. We ended up having lunch together, and talking about climbing (...seriously, does everyone here climb rocks, and I just didn't realize before) and modern Christianity's issues. Which was interesting!
Then I bought a Greek-English dictionary and a backpack, and walked home in the horrible horrible horrible heat. Seriously. It is horrible. It is bright and sunny and has hit three digits. I'd actually really like to go climbing today, but walking to the bus stop in this heat... Ugh. Maybe I'll do my homework for now, and think about climbing tomorrow.
If I can just keep up with the memorization, this summer is going to be awesome.