Today was my very first Oxford tutorial. It was just as you might expect: challenging, a little intimidating, but very helpful and informative! That's some good education.
We talked a bit about my essay that's due next week, and then spent about an hour going over my Greek assignment. She started by asking me to read the Greek aloud, which was scary as it's been a loooong time since I've had to do that. I did fine, but slow! It was good, though, as I need to get better at it.
She noted I tended to pronounce certain words differently, and said she wasn't sure if it was my accent or the way I learned to pronounce Greek. Whatever - I don't have an accent, she has an accent! :) But I explained that I had learned Greek in college from a Greek-born teacher, who taught us modern Greek pronunciation because the academic pronunciation hurt his ears. I've been trying to unlearn that ever since, because in graduate school modern Greek hurts everyone's ears! She laughed and said that she learned Greek from an Australian and a Scot, so her pronunciation is a little idiosyncratic, too!
Anyway, we went through a few sections of Cyril's complicated letter line by line and she helped with some questions I had. She gave me all kinds of helpful tips for reading classical Greek, which, unlike New Testament Koine ("common") Greek, is very formal and rhetorically polished. Happily, I was able to give her a tip, too - an online Greek lexicon that is much quicker than thumbing through a big book! She thought that sounded mighty useful.
Overall, I think I did OK considering my terrible rustiness. She said "Good work" at the end, but might have just been being nice! But I know I'll get faster and better at my translations as the term goes on. I've learned a ton already just in one week of homework and one tutorial. She also prescribed at least two sentences of Greek per day, which is a very good idea as with all languages.
I wasn't sure how long the tutorials would be, but it looks like she has only alloted an hour for each one. We took about an hour and 20 minutes this time, but a poor student was waiting outside her office for the last 20 minutes. It went fast and wish I had had even longer!
For next week, I have to write a 5,000 word (about 20 page) essay on Constantine. I haven't completedly narrowed down the topic yet, but I think it will be a general treatment of his own religion (i.e., Did he really have a vision of the cross in the sky? Did he really become a Christian, or was it a political move? If the former, what did "Christian" mean to him? How much theology did he really contribute to the Council of Nicea? What was his relationship to paganism after his conversion? and so on...)
After the tutorial, I went to the theology library and checked out a bunch more books on Constantine. I spent most of the rest of the day reading them and starting to gather some notes. (I had no lectures today.) It will be a tall order to write a quality essay of that length in just a week, but at least it's a subject I'm interested in and I have lots of great sources to work from. I've been having fun with it - it's like detective work, looking through the ancient sources for evidence, weighing their reliability, considering the context, etc. Fortunately, Constantine wrote a ton of letters himself, more than almost any other Roman emperor.
Tonight I rested my weary brain with two episodes of the TV show "24" with David, which we rented from Amazon.co.uk (they have a great rent-by-mail program like NetFlix). It was wonderfully addictive as always, and brought back fun memories of our Tanasbourne apartment, where we watched something like 8 episodes on DVD in a row one weekend!
Tomorrow I had tentative plans to attend one lecture on The Nature of Religion and another on Judaism in the Late Second Temple Period. I may choose just one of those, though, as the Constantine paper takes first priority.
I am having so much fun! What a lucky girl I am.
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