Friday, January 4, 2013

A Budding Greek Scholar

Bud came home from school earlier this week saying he was learning Greek!

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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