Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Leonidas
Trip Start
Sep 07, 2008
1
22
148
Trip End
Dec 09, 2008
Athens,
Greece
Monday, September 15, 2008
Here are some interesting fragments I learned in my Ancient Greek Monuments class today:
- Never, ever take anything from a Greek monument. Our professor (don't know him well enough to give him a nickname yet) told the story of a Canadian woman who picked up a sherd of marble on the Acropolis. She was arrested, convicted of antiquities theft, deported, and banned from visiting Greece for ten years.
- We can tell from the ancient Greek language (if I had taken a linguistics class earlier in my college studies, I might have changed my major, it's so fascinating) that the people we would now call the Greeks originally came from a place far away from the sea. They had to borrow the word for sea, "thalassa," from the locals -- whom they conquered when they migrated to Greece from the north -- because they had no such word wherever they were from.
- British boarding schools (and therefore also Hogwarts) are based on the ancient Spartan educational model of barracks schools.
In the afternoon, we had our first Modern Greek Language lesson. The experience reminded me, fifteen years later, of why I entered an undergraduate honors program where I worked mostly one-on-one with professors rather than sitting in class: it's because I'm unfit to be a student in a regular classroom. I'm that obnoxious nerdy student the cool kids hate. I'm so excited to show the professor what I have worked so hard to already know, and I'm even more excited to learn from the professor all the amazing things I don't already know. I want to ask a million questions. I want to do extra work to learn more. I am going to have to remember to keep my mouth shut. This is the students' experience and I am only a guest in the room soaking up the learning. A grade is not on the line for me.
That being said, I have to go now to begin preliminary research on my first essay for the Ancient Monuments course. Yours Uber-nerdly wants to get her paper all researched before the students get around to doing theirs and are needing the books in the program library for themselves.
