Comments | rochvelleth: Classicists with Cambridge experience

rochvelleth

Classicists with Cambridge experience - please help!

Aug 18, 2010 11:27

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!

( The questions )

cambridge, help, classics, advice

Comments 7

the_lady_lily August 18 2010, 12:22:19 UTC

Hark, I go back through the mists of my memories without a diary to try and work out what I can remember...

1) In first year, how much Latin language teaching was arranged for you by your college? One hour a week? Two hours a week? Something else?

So. For the first term, we had three hours every week on Friday from a terrifyingly good teacher called Pam, who was meant to pull us all up by our bootstraps and make sure we knew what the hell we were doing. This worked, although we all hated it at the time like the plague. I think we went down to one hour a week after that.

2) In first year, how much Greek language teaching was arranged for you by your college? One hour a week? Two hours a week? Something else?

As I was IG, I got the Faculty-organised sessions as well for this, but we were on an hour a week. Initially they put the three of us who were IG with the student who had GCSE Greek, but they separated us out after the first term on our request.

3) In second year, how much Latin language teaching was arranged for you by your ( ... )

rochvelleth August 18 2010, 16:43:31 UTC

Thank you so much for this, it's very helpful indeed. And it's so impressive that you still have this sort of information on file - I think my records of my undergraduate time are all in a box in the shed somewhere!

the_lady_lily August 18 2010, 16:57:08 UTC

It's only because I keep my files obsessively and an external hard drive makes that easy - so I have all the essays I wrote handy to check and can thus reconstruct what I'd never be able to remember!

epea_pteroenta August 22 2010, 13:26:06 UTC

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

rochvelleth August 23 2010, 11:00:37 UTC

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 August 26 2010, 11:27:51 UTC

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 ( ... )

rochvelleth August 26 2010, 12:37:48 UTC

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.