There's a book in my head,

and I'm trying to find a title for it. Right now it's either going to be The Tao of Greek, The Zen of Greek, or The Way of Greek - a relatively light book about the therapeutic effects of studying Ancient Greek, drawn from my own personal experience. There is something about the discipline required to master a language like Greek that reminds me of the principle of Mindfulness that runs through the Taoist and Zen (which is essentially Buddhist Taoism) traditions that I'd really like to explore. Learning Ancient Greek is an immersive experience, but unlike learning a spoken foreign language the immersion takes place in memorizing the thousands of inflections possible for nouns and verbs. Even the word for "the" exists in 24 distinct forms! At the same time, however, a student must learn to let go of his or her preoccupation with the grammar in order to understand the Greek, which requires a certain looseness of mind to allow the pieces to fit as they're meant to. Countless times I've seen students stymied by a sentence, not because they couldn't account for the syntax and morphology of every last phrase, word, and particle - as they almost always can - but because they couldn't then stand back from the nuts and bolts to see what those component parts were trying to say when taken as a whole.

The paradox of Ancient Greek is similar to that of jazz, where a mastery of the form exists side-by-side with a deliberate attempt to distance oneself from it, to lose oneself in the flow, but never actually be lost. It's a kind of elegant slack that resists and even evades overanalysis, which brings us back again to the notions at the core of Zen and the Tao. To speak precisely about Greek is to miss the mark. This is the first lesson that any serious student of the language must learn and learn well, as most would-be Hellenophiles come to the language of Pericles and Plato thinking that Ancient Greek is a classical clockwork, eminently rational and logical almost to a fault. While it's true that Greek is able to home in on a thought with a pinpoint accuracy that puts a language like our to shame, it is at the same time capable of being ten times more ambiguous than English as well - sometimes in the very same sentence! Getting a student to understand this principle and embrace it is (as far as I'm concerned) the fundamental challenge of teaching Greek, yet why doesn't it surprise me that there aren't any books out there that address this issue?

In fact, there is very little literature at all on how to teach Greek - Google the phrase "how to teach Greek" and you'll get 24 measly hits; "how to teach Ancient Greek" gets none at all, or at least will get none until this page gets spidered! - mostly because we have approached the idea of teaching Greek as a necessary evil, something we all endure and then spend the rest of our careers as Classicists trying to forget. That it doesn't have to be this way honestly never occurs to most of us, and when an outsider with an interest in Ancient Greek dares to call us onto the carpet for our slapdash pedagogy and questionable sink-or-swim ethic, instead of taking a good, hard Socratic look at ourselves we circle the wagon and attack the critic for being weak, like a fraternity coming down like a ton of bricks on a pledge for having the gall to complain about being hazed. Because isn't that exactly what we teachers of Greek are - a fraternity, with its arcane traditions, brutal hazing methods, and an Old Boy insiderishness that drive ninety-nine people away for every one we attract and manage to keep? We even have the Greek letters!

That is why I need to write this book. Who in our field dares talk about these things, for fear of being ostracized for it? It wasn't always this way, of course. Back in the 19th Century there were a few honest attempts to teach Greek as it should be taught, and not as it always was. John Jay Chapman was a fiery humanist from that period who had some unorthodox but wonderful things to say about the learning, teaching, and reading of Ancient Greek that I try hard to integrate into my own methods. I'll see if I can dig any of his more memorable quotes up, but in the meantime if you have access to the journal Arion go and find "The Classical Writings of John Jay Chapman," edited by William Arrowsmith in the 1992/1993 memorial issue, in honor of Professor Arrowsmith, who had just passed away.

Hmm. Looking at Chapman's biography I see that he graduated from Harvard in 1885. Is it possible that he, too, studied Greek with my good friend Sophocles? The plot thickens!