My student, a senior pre-med biology major, finished translating the 10th sentence of the exercises for lesson 50 of our ancient Greek textbook and I told him, congratulations, he was my fourth student at the school I've taught to complete all of the grammar.
Then I pulled up Plato's Apology of Socrates on the internet and we translated the first sentence. I told him, we'll be spending the remaining two weeks of class and next spring semester translating all of it and if we finish, there's plenty of Plato. And Greek literature.
I also told him, I appreciated him sticking with the Greek through all the years. I had first taught him Latin when he was a freshman (he had studied it for four years at a Catholic school near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and was the only student who showed up consistently for class) and then elementary Greek last year and then we were able to have the Dean approve intermediate Greek though it is a very, very tiny enrollment.
'I like Greek,' he said. Then he told me that his parasitology test involved identifying the eggs for six different types of tapeworms and they all looked alike, after hours and afternoons of him and his lab partner staring at them through the microscope.
Then he asked about what Greek dictionary he might get?
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