Meggie Macdonald

I have recently become rather outraged at the continued examples of a rigid perpetuation of “standard” learning methodologies. There is more than one way for a person to learn, and different people learn in different ways. This is so rudimentary it is banal to teachers, or so I thought.

For example, in the second year level Ancient Greek course that I have just recently completed, we rather painfully and pedantically meandered through the grammatical lessons in our textbook and were continuously assigned exercises that outlined the use of various linguistic structures. I entirely lost interest. It was not until the very last part of the year, when we began looking at selections of primary source documents, that my enthusiasm was revived and I wanted to develop an understanding of ancient Greek writers. As a result, I focused much more carefully on vocabulary subtleties and grammatical styles used by these authors and developed a much more functional and practical interest in the language.

I have focused my research on areas in classical history that require knowledge of both Greek and Latin for proper study of primary sources. When I started reading Caesar, Livy, and Virgil in class, I was fascinated by their use of the language and how much of their own personalities shone through in the pages. I have a deeper understanding of Latin after studying their work than I ever did from grammatical exercises. Single sentences, lacking any context whatsoever, are almost entirely useless to me. How am I supposed to learn to translate what ancient authors wrote when they very rarely wrote only one sentence without any connections or allusions of any sort? Even Martial’s devish epigrams had links to the rest of his world. Sentences designed to show off grammar written by philologists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are well nigh ridiculous.

I grant that a certain degree of linguistic education is vital in order to develop a working knowledge of any language, particularly one’s own. But without learning it in a practical context or environment, what use is it except to philologists? Perhaps there needs to be two different classes for learning languages: one that is linguistically and philologically based, and one that actually takes into account the historical value of the primary source texts as it goes along.

Otherwise there will be more students such as myself who dread ‘having’ to learn the language because we never really understand it or get to use it until we’re old and grey. More professors of language MUST realize that there is more than one way to teach it to students, or a classicist’s greatest fear – that their field will be lost to modern concepts of redundancy – will come true.