Imagine my surprise that this was in the second-grade curriculum.
He went on to explain that he was doing the "older student" level on Lexia, the school's computerized reading program and it was teaching him Greek root words: tech, psych, tele, bio, chrono, and so forth.
Rarely getting the opportunity to put my eight college semesters of ancient Greek to use these days, I whipped out a pen and paper to show him how the Greeks wrote those words. A mini-Greek lesson ensued, as I wrote those words in Greek, and both of their names, then changed the first lines of the Iliad in the original and ended with my favorite quote:
tis de bios; ti de terpnon;
ater cruses Afrodiths.
What is life? What is love? Without golden Aphrodite . . . .
I was rusty, but they didn't know. And we all had fun.
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