Rouse: A Greek Boy at Home

[Jonathan Robie]

Stephen,

Rouse's dictionary is meant to support his serial story "A Greek Boy at Home." Here's a link. The dictionary is at the back of the book. ....

Here are the links to both volumes of Rouse (Paul provided the first):

https://archive.org/details/greekboyathomest01rousuoft
https://archive.org/details/greekboyathomest00rousuoft

[Jonathan Robie]

Here is the methodology used to teach the class, which is taught completely in Greek:

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[Jonathan Robie]

Here is how Rouse arranged the vocabulary, in his own words:

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[Jonathan Robie]

Rouse mentions in his introduction that most instructors aren't used to discussion in Greek, and may have difficulty doing question and answer. He provides some dialogues designed to teach the teachers how to do this.

I have been looking for examples of this kind of question and answer, and was pleased to find it here. Very little of what I read contains question / answer sections, I've read a lot of narrative, so it's hard for me to ask this kind of question about a text in Greek, which is something I want to learn.

Rouse claims these are sufficient to teach a teacher how to start doing question / answer sections on any kind of material.

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[Paul-Nitz]

This is good stuff. Thanks for inserting the images. That's helpful.

In the language learning method I used to learn Chichewa (Brewster LAMP) learning how to ask about the language was paramount. I hadn't thought of it before, but learning how to understand and ask questions is equally important in employing a communicative approach to learning Greek.

I've pretty much got the questioning down now after over a year of teaching this way, but one mistake I often make is to put the interrogative at the end as I'm thinking on the fly...

ἐποίησεν τί;
αντι
τί ἐποίησεν;

By the way, not having any better term, I have consistently used "communicative approach" to label this sort of teaching. I think people are settling on the term Teaching with Comprehensible Input (TCI). Within TCI are the various methods (TPR, TPRS, WAYK).

[Jonathan Robie]

Incidentally, Markos posted a link to a book in which Rouse describes his teaching methods in careful detail. I'm copying that link here for reference: Latin on the Direct Method

Rouse described his experience in a letter to The Classical Journal in 1904:

In your paper on "The Translation Habit,"[1] you suggest among possible remedies : " (4) The direct method was proposed by an ardent advocate." Whether or not it is necessary to "abandon this suggestion without a trial," it is the one infallible remedy. I taught in various public schools for fifteen years, always having this trouble to deal with, or at least to guard against; but in the thirteen
years that the direct method has been used in this school, we have never had any trouble with it at all. Nobody uses cribs, because cribs are of no use; if they did use cribs, the cribs would not help them to read authors in Latin and to discuss their meaning in Latin. Nevertheless, when called upon to translate passages thus read, everyone can do it. To give a striking proof, I add that last December a boy won one of the five open scholarships and exhibitions at Balliol, who had never used translation as a method of learning Latin; and he was a year under the statutory age. You know, of course, that the Balliol scholarships are the great prize coveted by English classical school- boys. We find the same thing year after year: boys trained on the direct method can compete with all comers trained by translation, and beat them, although they have given only about one-fifth of the time usually given to classics.

As for teachers, they can do as we have done: they can teach themselves. It only needs work.

Yours faithfully,

W. H. D. Rouse
Perse School House, Cambridge

[Jonathan Robie]

Incidentally, Louis posted about Rouse in 2009:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-gr ... 51309.html

Here is a guide for teachers using this method, it goes into sample lesson plans, etc:

The Teaching of Greek at the Perse School

[Louis L Sorenson]

Also here: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/forum/vie ... ilit=rouse

[Jonathan Robie]

Also here: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/forum/vie ... ilit=rouse

Ah, I'm sure I saw that thread before. Thanks for pointing to it.

Another related resource: Via nova; or, The application of the direct method to Latin and Greek (1915).

[Stephen Hughes]

This is good stuff. Thanks for inserting the images. That's helpful.

Ἀμὴν καὶ μάλιστα τὰς εἰκόνες. (Yeah, and epecially for the images).