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Classes have been very discouraging lately. Virgil isn't particularly difficult anymore--I can get into a terrible tangle with his exciting rearrangement of words now and again, but I can do that with any Latin author, right down to Caesar--but neither do I feel like I have anything interesting to say about what he writes. (I'm going to see if I can come up with a topic for a single 3k research paper, rather than two 1.5k papers, as the prof suggested we could; at least then I only have to say an interesting thing once.) And Plato is just...frustrating. Half the time I can't figure out what the hell he's saying, and the remaining half of the time I tend to get it wrong or awkward because he's saying something so dumb I put the words in the wrong place or translate them with the wrong version of some verb because I'm trying to make it make sense.
It all makes me wonder if I'm really cut out for grad school. So much frustration and stress, with just two classes! How am I going to handle more, and harder ones, plus thesis and TA work and everything else? (I suppose I don't have to worry about that until I get into grad school. Ha.)
On the other hand, it's becoming clear that some of my shrieking frustration with Greek is quite specifically with Plato. This week's assignment in that class was a selection from Gorgias, and that was full of goofy synonyms and wacky parallel structure and inane arguments and a distinct avoidance of finite verbs when any other type of verb form could be deployed, and it was still significantly easier to translate and understand than anything of Plato has been lately. So that's...sort of reassuring?
A prof suggested that I try to go into grad school with a focus on Greek oratory rather than Latin poetry; she said that there's more room in the field to play around and find an interesting angle that hasn't already been beaten to death, and that it'd fit better with the program I'm applying to anyway. And... she probably has a point. And I do really enjoy Lysias! (And Antiphon, too, who will argue goofy things but in a much less smug way than Socrates does.) But Greek is just so damn hard, and Latin is so darn pretty, and...well. I don't know. Maybe she has a point.
Mostly I'm very tired of this semester, and it's only halfway through. Sigh.
Senior-level classes in ancient languages are very hard! Who would have guessed?
It all makes me wonder if I'm really cut out for grad school. So much frustration and stress, with just two classes! How am I going to handle more, and harder ones, plus thesis and TA work and everything else? (I suppose I don't have to worry about that until I get into grad school. Ha.)
On the other hand, it's becoming clear that some of my shrieking frustration with Greek is quite specifically with Plato. This week's assignment in that class was a selection from Gorgias, and that was full of goofy synonyms and wacky parallel structure and inane arguments and a distinct avoidance of finite verbs when any other type of verb form could be deployed, and it was still significantly easier to translate and understand than anything of Plato has been lately. So that's...sort of reassuring?
A prof suggested that I try to go into grad school with a focus on Greek oratory rather than Latin poetry; she said that there's more room in the field to play around and find an interesting angle that hasn't already been beaten to death, and that it'd fit better with the program I'm applying to anyway. And... she probably has a point. And I do really enjoy Lysias! (And Antiphon, too, who will argue goofy things but in a much less smug way than Socrates does.) But Greek is just so damn hard, and Latin is so darn pretty, and...well. I don't know. Maybe she has a point.
Mostly I'm very tired of this semester, and it's only halfway through. Sigh.
Senior-level classes in ancient languages are very hard! Who would have guessed?