Using B-Greek in Greek Classes?

[Jonathan Robie]

In yesterday's Sunday School class, we had a few people who teach Greek at Duke, and they asked if teachers are using B-Greek as part of their instruction.

There have been a few times that teachers have encouraged students to use B-Greek, but that hasn't been an ongoing thing. Are there things that we could do here that would be especially helpful to students who are taking Greek classes? If so, what, and at what level?

[Alan Patterson]

By virtue of the fact that some individuals in B-Greek seem to be well connected to academia, I think it might be more profitable Jonathan if you go about this another way. You need to find out what the students who use B-Greek are running into while taking their college/seminary/university classes. Something like send professors, from a variety of institutions, an email to have their students fill out and send back to you. In other words, perhaps it could be an email that the professor forwards to a few students, and each student responds and then sends directly back to you.

If that is just impractical, then some modification may be in order, but I would think we want to hear from students. These are the guys for which you are considering improving B-Greek. Hope I'm not way off here.

[Shirley Rollinson]

In yesterday's Sunday School class, we had a few people who teach Greek at Duke, and they asked if teachers are using B-Greek as part of their instruction.

There have been a few times that teachers have encouraged students to use B-Greek, but that hasn't been an ongoing thing. Are there things that we could do here that would be especially helpful to students who are taking Greek classes? If so, what, and at what level?

I mention B-Greek to my Intermediate and Advanced students, but not to the Beginners.
The Beginners are not yet up to par with the English grammatical terms. "Participles" have to be described as "-ing words" for weeks and weeks before the students really remember - and the "Relative Pronoun" scares them silly. "I see the man whose coat is black" again and again, for what seems like a whole semester. I doubt that they would survive more than one posting on B-Greek. Besides that, they can neither spell (English or Greek) nor type Greek really well.
Intermediate students have a better grasp of things, and Advanced ones are getting good at analysis - BUT - what makes me hesitant about really encouraging them to join B-Greek is the tone of some of the replies to postings from members.
I don't want someone shooting them out of the water for asking a stupid question.
eg. one of the Advanced students today, working through "Judith", came to the Feminine Plural Nominative form of the Definite Article, (granted it was separated from the participle or noun by several other words), and looked up and said "What's this αἱ word ?" He has no problems at all with oἱ and τα - but something slightly unfamiliar throws them for a loop.
So until everyone is prepared to be very, very patient, and very, very gentle I'm just not going to encourage my students to jump into the lions' den