Classicists with Cambridge experience - please help!

[rochvelleth]

As you probably know, I'm starting out as a DoS, and I just wanted to get a quick survey of what Cambridge undergraduates in Classics experienced in their first and second years. I'd be very grateful if you could spare five minutes to answer a few questions!

Comments

[epea_pteroenta]

Sorry for the delay! Broken internet. Oimoi. Hope this is still useful!

1+2) We had two hours a week bunched together of prose composition (one hour per language). Sometimes, especially in Easter term, we did some unseens. It wasn't terribly satisfactory tbh, though we did all get vg at prose comp!

3+4) We still got 2 hours per week of prose composition but we also got one hour per week on unseens with a different supervisor. We did 2 unseens in exam conditions in an hour in the library and then the following day we'd spend an hour going over them with our supervisor. We alternated Greek and Latin each week. In both first and second year for unseens, I was with the other two non-IG classicists from my college. For prose comp in 2cd year the group was sometimes bigger.

5) Two. One for each text.

6) Two. One for each text.

7) Two.

8) Two.

9) Two for each of my subject choices (i.e. two linguistics, two philosophy)

10) Generally speaking it was good. I met my supervisors at the beginning of each term, work was set, supervisions arranged and then I went to them all! I think it's really important all this is arranged well; I know people at other colleges who could tell you a very different story. Students don't arrange things unless they're prodded into it, I've found!

In 2cd year, there's a lot of angst from students about literature options - some DoSs don't let them take particular options because they're in the same term so that the student could end up doing all their literature in one term and not having anything in the other, if that makes sense. This is stupid and needlessly stops people doing the options they want to do. My DoS didn't have this issue and made sure my friend (who was in this position with the options he wanted to do) nevertheless got his supervisions spread properly over the terms.

Finally, having supervised at this college subsequently, I can say that language provision for first years has increased since my first year! My students got a minimum of one hour a week per language on unseens. A couple whom I supervised who struggled with language, got 2 hours, one on one with me - lucky things! ;)

I always found having a friendly, approachable DoS who really cared about our issues and our studies and what we wanted to do really made my time studying at Cambridge special. I would never have gone to my tutor over my DoS if I had a problem.

[rochvelleth]

This is very very useful indeed, thank you! Especially because you've got both of the learning and teaching sides covered.

That's really interesting that you did so much prose comp. At King's we had to choose to do prose comp separately if we wanted to, and if we didn't then we just had normal language supervisions that involved Simon and John setting us about four unseen passages plus a pract crit of an unseen. (Well, even if we did do prose comp, we still had this, but we had the comp on top of it.)

That's good thinking on the 2nd year lit options too. I may have to work on the friendly approachability though :)

[epea_pteroenta]

re prose comp, I don't think anyone was forced to do it. My year happened to be strong linguistically (and generally my college tends to take strong linguists) and we were all enthusiastic about it. In second year not all of us did prose comp though. My DoS being the main prose comp guy in the university was obviously biased in favour of (a) us doing it and (b) taking students who'd be good at it. I do think that in first year he had the balance between prose comp and unseens too skewed in favour of the former, but that isn't the case any more.

Ooh prac crits. That's another thing. We never did enough. Because we'd have an essay supervision for text/topic then that would just cover essays, we'd get to Easter Term having done no prac crits and we'd generally do one in our revision supervision. Not ideal though. Last year I ended up giving my 1As a couple of extra prac crit supervisions in Easter term because they felt so unprepared for it (even though I wasn't actually their literature supervisor). I don't know what the solution to that is, as I think it is really important to have written an essay on each topic, and doing both an essay and prac crit for one supervision is a lot.

[rochvelleth]

Ooh, you've just given me an idea about who I might ask to do prose comp supervisions with my students... :) I think I'm going to spell out to the first years what comp involves and just let them choose to do it if they want to. At least trying Latin is a good thing - I never did Greek comp, because in week 0 when I started Simon asked me if I wanted to do it for both languages and I decided not to be too ambitious. The other people in my year all went for it, had one supervision, and then decided it wasn't for them :)

Prac crits, yes, you're right there. Simon and John used to make us do prac crits on unseen passages as part of our language work, which was a nice way of doing it. But I don't think I can ask my supervisors to do that because it results in 2 hour supervisions :/ But I'm trying to think of a way of getting prac crits into their lit supervisions - I might take them for some extra supervisions myself doing this.