I have been Nancy Evan's
mentor throughout this year-long project of creating SuperMacLang
lessons for Classical Greek. We consider the year's work to be
a success. As Nancy pointed out in her Spring Report, some work
remains in making the Greek font that the students require less
cumbersome to install on their machines; we are confident that
the second year of these lessons will take advantage of great
simplifications in this regard.
But it is also of considerable interest that the students at
the top and the bottom of the class claimed to be the least edified
by the lessons. I am on record as saying that the real pedagogical
advantage of computer lessons lies not in the opportunities which
they offer for the best students, who may in fact prosper under
any scheme, but for the poorer students, who are offered new
ways to retain information (that is, to memorize). The advantage
for the better students lies in the fact that the class can be
kept together much more easily if the poorer students are helped;
the bottom half of the class is not so much of a drag on the
top half as it could be otherwise. Here, the mid-range benefited
most; we are confident that next year's technological simplifications
will extend the range of these benefits.
Mentoring has many benefits, and I have been much edified by
the process. Nancy has created a very sophisticated system of
drills and quizzes in which questions of increasing complexity
really do test the student's command of verb and noun forms,
and of vocabulary, without actually requiring that they type
material in Greek. This has proved to be a revelation to me,
and will be incorporated in next year's revisions of my Latin
lessons. Further, the on-line quizzes are particularly valuable
for freeing up time for in-class instruction, and this is another
one of the components of her exercises that I will be adopting
in my Latin class next Fall. But I would like to point out, as
I did in last semester's Report, a few of the other benefits
which I derived from this collegial involvement, and which I
think, mutatis mutandis, may be of use to other members of the
foreign language faculty and to our colleagues as a whole.
By following along with Nancy's lessons, I am able to keep up
on the course materials and the pedagogy of the other language
which I teach here. Classicists trade off Latin and Greek, at
different levels and at different times; I can keep myself fresh
and prepared for the time when I teach Greek 101. But in a broader
sense, and one particularly applicable at a time of self-evaluation,
our involvement in each other's lessons (reading through them,
taking the quizzes, keeping each other aware of typos and small
corrections, offering encouragement for work well done) allows
us to evaluate constantly what our pedagogical goals are for
our department. They keep us on the same wavelength.
On-line lessons are probably the most vital (as well as the most
readily available) means for all of us in languages to see what
we collectively are up to. The lessons that we make for students
are also an excellent means of inter-departmental communication;
we can brush up our other languages and keep track of the nuts-and-bolts
of contemporary language instruction at the same time. For example,
it would be good for me to go through some of the on-line components
of German 101; and I could perhaps offer some advice to the German
department in so doing. Similarly, we here in Latin and Greek
would be glad to hear reactions to and questions about our lessons
from our non-Classical colleagues.
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