Saturday, September 01, 2012
A New Way of Teaching Elementary Greek
James A. Arieti, "John M. Crossett: A Memoir," in Donald V. Stump et al., edd. Hamartia: The Concept of Error in the Western Tradition. Essays in Honor of John M. Crossett (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), pp. 281-287 (at 284):
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In 1970, he was offered and he accepted the position of Professor of Classics at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, and he taught there until his death in 1981. At Cornell he was finally able to experiment with a new way of teaching elementary Greek. Instead of using a traditional textbook, his students began at once by translating Aristotle's De Interpretatione. Students picked up Greek grammar as they went along. Crossett defended his method by observing that, even were his students to quit Greek after only one year, they would still have read a major Greek author, worked out a theory of language, and developed a sense of the beauty and complexity of ancient Greek.
