I Passed Greek!!!

Korrin B.

March 24, 2009 - 2:00 PM

A couple months ago, I wrote a blog post on how I loved my Ancient Greek class and how I found it fascinating and it was because of these feelings that I would be able to stick it out through all of the hard grammar and memorization. Well, things change. Although I do still think that Ancient Greek is an absolutely cool subject to study, to be truly successful at it, you have to be able to dedicate all of your time to it. With work and other classes, this couldn't happen for me.

Winter term Greek 102 was one of my most difficult classes so far. First of all, it was winter term, which is always just kind of tough since it's dark and cold outside and hence making it the time college students are the most ridden with existential angst. Second, Greek 102 moves super fast. We're talking at the speed of light. After only one class session, you can be expected to have memorized like five different sets of six verbs endings and have to know how they translate.

Meanwhile, everyone keeps throwing words at you like aorist subjunctive active, future more vivid conditional sentence, and genitive of agent, and you are suppose to know what all of this means! I struggled a lot with this term and went from getting an A- fall term, to changing my grading option to pass/no pass winter term and praying to pass.

Well, I happen to be a pretty quality student in my opinion, so of course I rallied toward the end and studied as much as I could for the final. I showed up every day for the last two weeks of class and tried my best on every homework assignment. I walked out of the final on Friday, March 20 and felt so great! I was finally done! All of that stress was behind me! There really is no feeling quite like finishing finals week. It is so relieving. At that point, the fate of my grade was up to Zeus and however it ended up, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Today, I logged on to DuckWeb to check my grade and...I passed Greek!!!! Yes!!! It felt so good to have all of that hard work pay off and to have that worry and stress out of my life!

Looking back at the two years I took of Ancient Greek at the University of Oregon, I am still very happy that I did it and I do not see it as a waste even if it doesn't count toward my degree now. It really is an amazing subject and helps expand the mind to some of its farthest extents. I might go back some day after I graduate and take more of it. Then I can relax and enjoy it as my only class instead of having to worry about everything else still.

However, I still need my language requirement. I'm in the Honors College and if there is one criticism I have it is that the Honors College requires undergraduates to fulfill both the math and science credits as well as the language credits. Outside of the Honors College, students only have to pick one. I think that both are incredibly important and greatly enrich the learning experience, but when students have so many other requirements to graduate as is, it makes it very hard to fit all of that in. It is especially hard with the language requirement because you have to have two-year equivalency, which means a full six terms of language. That takes up a lot of space in a schedule. It is also part of the reason why I will be handing over (a good chunk created by loans) another $23,397.00 in out-of-state tuition and fees to the University of Oregon for a fifth year. Awesome, huh? Not so much. I love the UO though, so somewhere buried in those ten of thousands of dollars in loans, it's worth it. I'm going to start the sign language sequence fall term 2009 - less grammar.