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Do You Speak Ancient Greek?
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The answer is – yes, you do. And it doesn't matter what your native tongue is – Russian, Spanish, English or Norwegian: whenever you use your telephone, sympathise with somebody, have symptoms of a stomach ache, go to school or to the zoo, get extremely exhausted, listen to a symphonic orchestra, study physics or chemistry, or just build your first pyramid of three bricks – be sure that you speak Greek. However, if you happened to be born Russian, you may live in happy ignorance about this to the end of your life, unless you start learning a foreign language.
Romans, Europeans and "New Russians"
Imagine a "new Russian." What does a person do, when he suddenly becomes rich? First, he buys things. Then he travels to other countries to get more things. Then he realizes it isn't enough, and tries to learn what other people know: he starts going to museums and theatres, to famous places and cities, tries to read and study more and if it's too late for himself, he looks for the best school for his children, making them learn foreign languages and study abroad. The most fashionable language in Russia is English, since it's the most popular one in international communication. But a hundred or two years ago it was French, and in Peter's times – German, and still earlier it was Greek. Keep that in mind, and let's have a look at the rest of Europe.
To be an educated person in Medieval Europe, one had to know Latin. Learned men spoke the language to each other and wrote manuscripts in it, although by that time Latin had long been a dead language. Still, it remained, so to say, the language of international scientific communication. Why? Let's move still further into the past, when Rome was a powerful empire. We know that the Romans conquered lots of lands and peoples, and moved as far as the British Isles, Africa and Asia. But if Egypt and oriental countries had already created their prominent and highly developed cultures, European nations remained on a rather primitive level. They were for the most part illiterate tribes. Therefore, wherever the Romans came, they brought their alphabet, calendar, laws and traditions. Afterwards the Roman Empire vanished, being ruined by some of the same tribes, but culture has its own ways of development that are always progressive, no matter who conquers who. Thus, the former European barbarians started to create national cultures of their own, basing them on what had already been invented by the Romans. They used the Latin alphabet for their native writing, and as to science and philosophy, they introduced only Latin-based terms, just to seem more significant and wise. Knowledge of Latin, due to sources of knowledge in general, became fashionable. That is how lots of Latin (actually, Greek) roots, Latin suffixes and prefixes as well as their inconvenient spelling filled European languages, remaining and working in them ever after. Whatever new terminology humanity invents on the way of its progress, the words of Ancient Greece live on m them: photosynthesis, anthropomorphous, telepathy, hydrodynamics, and so on.
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But it isn't the answer to spelling yet, and we have to move further, when the same old story happened to the Romans themselves. In the beginning they were not at all philosophers, but brave soldiers. First, they built their Eternal City, then filled it with beautiful things and buildings and, having become rich and powerful, wished to be educated, as their neighbours. Just as our "new Russians." The educational base for the Romans was, no doubt, Hellas. That's where they took books and philosophy from, as well as teachers for the patricians' kids. Greek became the fashionable language to study. However, there was peculiarity about the fashion, since the Romans had already created their own alphabet and, therefore, had to rewrite Greek scientific terms and other words in Latin. That is when our problems began! The scrupulous descendants of Romulus and Remus did their best to copy strange Greek soundings. If only they could imagine, what they were doing! They started to spell the sounds, that seemed aspirated to them with their native letters plus "h": ph, th, ch, rh, but they couldn't, of course, make everyone pronounce them this way, so they finished by speaking as it was convenient: [f], [t], [k], [r]. Then, finding no more correspondences, they went as far as to invent three more letters especially to reproduce specific Greek ones: x, y, z, and put them at the end of the Latin alphabet after the last letter W. Just compare, by the way, the former Latin alphabet from A to W and Greek from A (alpha) to Д (omega). For instance, the letter "y" meant a sound like "ii" in German or "eu" in French, but as the Romans had no such a sound, they very soon started to read it as "i" and even called it "i-grec," that is "i Greek." Anyhow, we have to "thank" the Romans, whenever we have troubles in spelling words like "hypothesis," "anxiety," "sympathy," "horizon," etc. But what's the use of knowing it? Maybe, for a European student it's nothing, but for a Russian learner, it's half a clue. The other half has to be found in the history of the Russian language.
Study at Home
Another pre-Soviet way of life is returning to Moscow. Home education has recently been legalized by city authorities. Moscow News applied to the education department of Moscow's government for comment.
Natalia Shelakhina, head of the department for preschool and primary education, saidthat until recently only parentsof sick and under-developed children were allowed to resortto home teaching. All parents who are not satisfied with the existing schools can hire private teachers or teach their children themselves.
Children learning at home will be formally registered in schools and their parents will get an equivalent of what the state annually spends on each student. The sum is officially estimated at 480 rubles (about $100).
Those who will want to improve their financial situation by skipping school will be disappointed. First, the amount is too small. Second, in order to get permission to educate a child at home the family must sign a contract with a school, after which its representatives examine the child's conditions. If that is approved, school representatives will provide a detailed curriculum and textbooks free of charge.
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Parents, in turn, have to provide basic knowledge for their kids. The children will be tested once a month, term, or year, depending on the specific school. If a child fails the exams he or she will have to continue studying in an assigned school. The schools will issue certificates to those who satisfactorily pass the exams.
Only few families choose to tutor their children at home. The majority are affluent families whose children are studying music or preparing for careers in sports. Those parents usually are not interested in state money. The authorities refused to identify any of them.
The education department maintains that this form of education is unlikely to spread. Just like a century ago, only the rich can afford home education. When contacted by phone, education authorities in several of Moscow's districts could not say if any children were going to be educated at home, sounding rather perplexed.
In 1992 the new law on education cancelled the Soviet compulsory education system. Many children are now washing cars, selling newspapers or just begging, and their parents are satisfied that the children earn their living themselves.
Moscow's education department is presently trying to restore the old system of registering children of school age to ensure that all go to primary school. The police are looking up parents who do not let their children go to school.
For the Young Teacher
Are you the kind of teacher whose children groan or sigh when the bell rings, because they don't want their lesson to stop? "What fun" they say as they leave the room. "We had a marvellous lesson today" they tell their mothers and fathers. "Our teacher's terrific" they tell their friends. Or are you the sort of teacher who says to the class "Now I'm going to read you a funny poem" – and does so in a voice of gloom – like a man announcing the death of a close friend. Or the kind of teacher who kills a child's enthusiasm and interest by saying in reply to a pupil's honest comment ("I don't like that story, miss, I think it' stupid"): "If you talk like that, Alice, I'll put you outside the classroom door." Ah, well! It takes all sorts of teachers to make a world, I suppose. But I like my children to have fun – perhaps because I remember so well my Great-Aunt Edith who believed that "children should be seen and not heard" and was never tired of telling me so.
What then is fun in a lesson – fun for children in a classroom? Perhaps I'd better start by saying pretty what it's not! It is not chaos. It is not the teacher clapping hands for silence with no result. It is not children jumping out of their places without purpose 'or reason. It is not children talking to each other at the tops of their voices in competition with the teacher. All this would show a teacher who has no control and no discipline. Above all, this kind of thing would reflect a lack of personal discipline in the mind of the teacher.
Fun, then, starts in the mind of the teacher, long before he gets anywhere near his school, let alone his particular classroom. It starts with a feeling and belief that teaching children is one of the jolliest things anybody can do. Hard work, heartbreaking, exhausting, exasperating – yes. But worthwhile and exciting. The good teacher is the one who keeps his mind open to new ideas and new impressions. He is one who seizes on the realities of the world around him today and incorporates them in the lesson of tomorrow. He is one who comes fresh to even routine stuff– tables in Arithmetic – verbs in Languages – dates in History – dull old stuff, but given a new look by the alive, alert teacher. He is one who prepares carefully and doesn't merely turn up the stuff of his training college notes of twenty years ago – or two years ago. The first step towards fun in the classroom, then, is "mental preparedness" – what's in the mind of the teacher. Next there is his "physical" organization or preparation.
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Organization is so important if a lesson is to be fun – if it is to go with a swing. Organization means having at hand the right books and the right number of them – the right tools for the job – pens, pencils, paper – the right apparatus for this lesson, not old junk covered with the dust of ages or "knocked up" to satisfy a training college examiner without any specific group of children or lesson for them in mind.
Now comes the all-important matter of the teaching manner. He should be alert and dynamic in voice and gesture. He should not have the desk as perpetual barrier between himself and his children. He should stand for his teaching and not lounge or sprawl in a chair. And finally, and of supreme importance, his voice should have variety in pitch, speed and volume. After all, the voice of the teacher is his supreme teaching aid. With it he teaches the subtleties of "grammar" that differentiate in English between this and these at the elementary level or the subtleties of "mood" in poetry, prose, and drama.
And so the teacher who is resolved that his lessons shall be fun reads and studies and listens daily and keeps himself "educated." So he goes through his lesson in advance and checks that all his "stores" are ready. Finally, he makes every effort to train his voice to be the servant of his will. The voice reflects the man and his mood. A man in his life, says Shakespeare, plays many parts. The teacher plays even more than many parts and his voice must be in tune with all the players and the play.
Given all this, the child has fun and the lesson is enjoyed. Teaching that is joyless and without fun lacks total effectiveness and it is certain that the teacher in only partly living!
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