Today we had another ‘games’ day in Greek class and I chose another game that I thought would be interesting, fun, and review the right material. It is called kindunos – JEOPARDY! I designed the game in ways similar to JEOPARDY (J), with categories such as ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’, ‘translations’, ‘vocab’, ‘word jumble’, and ‘wildcard’. For each of these categories you could choose questions that varied in difficulty from 1pt questions to 2pt to 4pt. Thus, when a team member who was less confident or skilled was ‘on the hot seat’, he or she could go for an easier question. It really worked out well.
I did NOT do the format of ‘the answer must be in the form of a question’. Also, after the question chooser had a chance to guess, the answer was no up for grabs to other teams. I did not have a good way to decide how to know who ‘buzzed’ in next, so we just did it with one question per team (4 teams of 4 people).
This worked out well because we were able to review a lot of information in a fun way.
Why do I have so many sessions of Greek where we ‘goof off’ and play games? Well, I am an advocate of learning Greek through multiple means. We sing, play games, read, etc… My Hebrew teacher used a vantriloquist dummy whose name was ‘Eli’ and Eli didn’t speak English. Eli would try to tell us stories, and our Prof., Dr. Overland, would have us come up one-by-one and translate. This kind of reinforcement is crucial to retaining languages. So, if you try kindunos let me know how it goes!
Given the standards you lay out here, would you accept the internal claim of Pauline authorship for the letters of Paul to Seneca? If not, why?
I think these are great ideas! I had taken Greek at Southeastern, but this is my first year taking Greek through a Classics department. I’d say 90% of what we do is just read and translate and, go figure, I’m actually getting better at Greek. I may ask our professor if we can play kindunos.