Upcoming

I have my German midterm tomorrow. I am a little nervous, but I think it is going to be ok. After that, I will post a review of the delicious wine I had tonight and maybe go to the doctor because my cold is getting worse.

And the Internet Returns!

Our internet went out for a few days and we just got it back. It reminds me how much I rely on the internet to communicate with people, do homework (Leo German Dictionary, most especially), track food and exercise, etc. It's back now and I hope to resume more normal blogging once I take my German final on Friday. Wish me luck!

Thoughts on Prehistoric Mammals

After my German class this morning, I sat and enjoyed a cup of tea on the porch with Servia. We discussed some science news that she had been reading. One of the articles she read was about a gigantic rabbit species found on an island near Spain. The rabbits are almost unrecognizable as such from the depiction in National Geographic. From there, we branched out more generally into a discussion to prehistoric island species and specifically the pigmy mammoth. Apparently, there were two entirely different types of pigmy mammoth. One was the mammoths of the channel islands, which were much like small elephants. There were also small woolly mammoths that remained in islands near the arctic. While I was reading up on this clarification, I found that there is a depiction of a mammoth from Egypt and some thought that it might be one of the Siberian mammoths or possibly even a mammoth similar to thoseof the channel islands that were found on Mediterranean islands.

Language in Translation

One of the great things about having taken Greek and Latin is that they are languages that teach one to look for the verb in a sentence and worry more about case than word order. This provides a significant advantage learning German, which I will need not only to pass my translation exam for graduate school but also to read probably significant amounts of Plato scholarship.

My reading in German is progressing fairly rapidly-- although we have to learn about 200 vocabulary words per week which is proving to be an insane task. I am certainly glad that I took this class. However, I wonder if my approach to translating will hinder my efforts in learning to speak German someday.

Reading vs. Speaking

 

I am taking a German class for graduate students this summer (starting Monday) in order to prepare me for graduate school. Any graduate program in classics will require translation exams in (usually two) modern languages. Much classical scholarship appears in Greek and French. I need this not only to pass the exam but to also look like a serious candidate for a department. On Stanford's website they say: "Modern languages are needed, too--as part of your professional development, you will have to pass a German translation exam plus one in French, Italian or modern Greek, and there is very little time in graduate school to learn these languages from scratch" (Classics department website).

I had five years of what I might call "tourist French" over the course of middle school and high school. It was basically useless. I can mostly understand basic French when it is spoken to me at a moderate pace and read very very basic short pieces (with a dictionary), but I can neither write nor speak with any skill whatsoever (other than asking for directions to the nearest bakery or similar). I have spent a little bit of time over the past week attempting to revive my French. It is going to be a hard slog, but it appears that learning Latin has made French a little easier.

My class this summer will take me through the process of learning how to read and translate German, with little to no emphasis on speaking. In general, I'm pretty excited. Even the practice sentences in the textbook are more interesting than any modern language textbook I have ever seen (mostly basic assertions of fact about famous physicists and philosophers). But I do have that nagging feeling: what if I actually need or want to talk to someone in German at some point? Have I chosen the wrong path?

The rational answer is probably not. I can always learn to speak (at least to people in my own field) once I build a technical vocabulary and I will far prefer reading scholarly texts than anything else I might read in a basic introduction. Plus, it's what I need for graduate school. I think I made the right choice.

Circumnavegating the Wall #2: Calculus

By the time I took calculus in high school, I was quite a good math student. I loved calculus and I could not wait to take more math in college. As I mentioned in "Cicumnavegating the Wall" in multivariable calculus I hit a wall and had to drop the course. It just did not make any sense. Consequently I pursued my other great passion, classics, and graduated with a BA. Math was no longer in the direct path to my future.

Being out of school made me realize that while institutions may organize education in order to place their students on particular paths, there is no reason that self-education must follow those same paths. So there was noting barring me from taking more math. As I promised in "New Year, New Possibilities," I registered at my local community college. Realizing that I needed a math refresher (and because of timing commitments) I decided to take Calculus I and I will move up through the math classes from there (they offer three semesters of calculus followed by linear algebra and differential equations). I took a big step and went to my first class today.

The past week, I have been nervous and annoyed about my decision to start the classes. There was no need. Calculus (at least the evening class I am taking) is a decently paced introduction taught by a middle aged man with a thick Indian accent and an efficient, clipped style. The class is entirely lecture, although after every few sentences he asks "is this ok?" which seems to translate to "understand?" and then he moves on without waiting for a reply. If a hand is raised he will eventually call on the person and he seems happy enough to answer genuine questions, but my best guess would be that he has taught this class for many years and simply wants to get the material to the students in the most expedient manner possible.

The students also surprised me. In the discussion before class, I ascertained that most of the students were at the college with the hopes of transferring into the local university. Many were in the class because they want to pursue degrees in engineering. I found them to be engaged with the class and intelligent. Although first impression are often misleading, I believe that these students will probably continue to be good classmates. I was really nervous about fitting in, but a few students asked me questions about the nature of the class during the break so I guess I must have looked like just another student. Luckily I fit the profile of the typical girl in the class (interestingly the class is a 50-50 gender split): skinny jeans, t-shirt, and boots (although I had knee-high instead of the ankle-height boots sported by the rest of the women).

Any of you who read my new year post noticed that I was also supposed to be taking German because it is one of the classes necessary to pursue a more advanced degree in classics. As it turned out, the class was based on conversational German and used a textbook reputed for avoiding tricky things like grammar. As much as it would be nice to be able to talk to people, what I need is academic German, and specifically German for reading. I realized that the money that I would be spending on the class itself could be spent instead on approximately 34 nonfat lattes which, if I could find a coffee shop, could allow me to spend that time more effectively trying to teach myself reading German. So my thought is that I will compare a few different textbooks. At the moment I am leaning toward Jannach's German for Reading Knowledge, which I have put on hold at the local library. If anyone has a recommendation, I would greatly appreciate it.

New Year, New Possibilities

I decided to take more math. It is a New Year and I think that means that it is time for me to start something new.

One thing that I hear a lot from college and post-college female friends is that they miss science or math. This seems to break stereotype. Going to an all-girls high school, I had always heard that single-gender education and tailoring classes to "the way that girls learn best" allows girls to feel comfortable in math or science (or any field) and should help confidence and begin to rectify the gender gap in the sciences. Yet, there seems to be something wrong with that theory. A number of girls who enjoyed science in high school but went into humanities, art, or social sciences instead.

Some of them probably had issues in their math or science classes like I did (as I mentioned in "Circumnavigating the Wall"). Some of them just decided another path was better, and now have changed their minds, or wish they could reincorporate math and science back into their life. The real problem seems to be that the sciences require constant devotion. To finish as a physics major in four years at my alma mater, you had to start immediately as a freshman, otherwise you could not graduate in time. However, students often changed their majors to the humanities or social sciences after the first year. The problem was not that there were less requirements-- it was that classes in the humanities and social sciences can be taken concurrently. For example, one could take a 200-level Shakespeare class, a 300-level Chaucer class and a 400-level Literary theory class all at the same time, provided instructor consent and student devotion to the subject. With math and science, there is much more of an order of things; each level builds on the previous one and requires a rigid line throughout. Most of my female friends have a large variety of interests [1], and either did not want to sacrifice most of their other interests to science or were not sure that was the path they wanted to venture down.

So what should this group of girls do, who like science but have BAs or are working toward BAs in other fields? Taking science classes after a BA is regarded by other people as "useless," "inefficiant," or "a waste of time and money." I decided that I don't care. Today I registered at a local college and when my registration is processed I am going to sign up for a calculus class. I will probably never need advanced mathematics in my life, just as I will probably never need to know the philosophical standpoint of Pierre Bourdieu, which I studied in my Lit Theory class, but I think that it will enrich me as a person.

I picked the college because it was nearby, but also because it decided to offer German. None of the programs in my area had been offering it. I guess it's because German is primarily useful for classicists and students of philosophy, neither of which really exist at the local colleges [2]. German will help me get into graduate school and will also allow me (hopefully) to eventually read the German philosophers and writer's I like in their original language.

I hope the classes are not so full that I cannot get into them. Wish me luck!

Endnotes

1. There are probably males in this position as well, I just do not know any of them. Most of the guys I know who have varied interests seem to have varied interests within the humanities, or are science majors who take a few classes in other disciplines but have never wavered in their devotion to science.
2. There is a big university near me (which has great programs in both classics and philosophy), but unfortunately one cannot take many classes there unless one is an actual student at the university.