Greek New Testament

I read on Justin Taylor's blog about this Annual Greek New Testament reading program. It looks awesome! The plan is to read through the entire Greek NT in one year. It was created by Lee Irons who has also put together a syntax guide to go along with the reading. Frank and I are going to attempt this for 2009. Exciting stuff!

Thoughts on Latin and Education from Victor Davis Hanson

On Latin:
Four years of high-school Latin would dramatically arrest the decline in American education. In particular, such instruction would do more for minority youths than all the ‘role model’ diversity sermons on Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Montezuma, and Caesar Chavez put together. Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar and syntax, so creates a discipline of the mind, an elegance of expression, and serves as a gateway to the thinking and values of Western civilization as mastery of a page of Virgil or Livy (except perhaps Sophocles’s Antigone in Greek or Thucydides’ dialogue at Melos). After some 20 years of teaching mostly minority youth Greek, Latin, and ancient history and literature in translation (1984-2004), I came to the unfortunate conclusion that ethnic studies, women studies—indeed, anything “studies”— were perhaps the fruits of some evil plot dreamed up by illiberal white separatists to ensure that poor minority students in the public schools and universities were offered only a third-rate education.

On education: I found this to be very witty and sadly, true.

The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.

Full article

Teaching and Learning

I came to the realization a few days ago that the only concepts I remember from the 4 semesters of music theory I took in college are the ones that I am putting to use right now. For example, I can only clearly recall chord theory that I currently use in playing on our worship band. Things like major sevenths, secondary dominants, or transposition are still clear in my mind. But I don't remember a thing from set theory and all that strange contemporary stuff.

I also remember the things I teach. I've been teaching piano for 6 years now. It's amazing how teaching really solidifies knowledge. When I have to actually spit back out the concepts that I learned passively, it takes twice as much brain power and creativity to explain it in a clear way that young students can understand. But when I do that, I remember it for so much longer.

It just occurred to me that it might be a good idea to have my students teach sometimes instead of always being the learner. It would kill two birds with one stone: they learn the material well, and it won't be as boring. That should work well with my Latin students...

Even if one never becomes a teacher in the professional sense, learning and teaching should always go hand in hand.

Thesis

After 3 long months of brainstorming, reading, and deliberation, I've finally settled on a thesis topic. Demographics of early Christians at Rome. My adviser introduced me to a great new resource last month: Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae (ICUR). It's this huge collection of inscriptions found in the Christian catacombs at Rome. It's a bit tedious translating all of them since they're all in Latin, but they're so interesting to read, especially the ones with little tributes written by their spouses, or by parents to their children. It has also been interesting to note that Christians seemed to die fairly young (in their 20s) undoubtedly because of persecution.

It's going to require a lot of tedious work, but no one has ever done this before so at least my research will be a contribution to classics and antiquity, however small it may be.