I would not eat them on a boat

Christopher Grundke teaches courses in Latin and ancient Hebrew. (Danny Abriel Photo)

Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. A rendition of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. A reading about Paddington Bear.
 
Sound like your average university classroom? Hardly. But Christopher Grundke, who teaches courses in Latin and Ancient Hebrew in the Classics Department, believes that learning a new language — even a very old one — means going back to basics.
 
“It requires becoming childlike,” he explains. “You have to set aside ideas that as one gets older, one ought to function exclusively on so-called higher levels of thought and inquiry. Beginning a language is like beginning to learn to do math: you have to start with the most elementary, basic matters.”
 
Dr. Grundke’s childlike approach to the basics not only provides his students with a break from the nose-to-grindstone work of learning a new language — recently, he was asked to offer a live reading for CBC Radio of Dr. Seuss’ classic “Virent Ova, Viret Perna,” better known by its English title, Green Eggs and Ham.
 
“I try to work them in as little luxuries along the way,” he says of his more novel teaching tools. “They hopefully remind people that Latin isn’t just about the adventures of senators and emperors, medieval poets and theologians. People lived and spoke and talked about their everyday lives in these languages as well.”
 
Teaching runs in the family, it seems — Dr. Grundke’s father, Ernst, is a professor in the Faculty of Computer Science. Christopher was originally set to follow his father’s footsteps into the sciences, but ended up changing course and doing graduate work in theology.
 
For him, learning ancient tongues provides a window into the past. “I’m fond of telling my students that learning languages is the next best thing to time travel,” he says. “You really do encounter the thoughts of the men and women of antiquity as they were forming them. If you want to meet the ancients on their own terms, you have to meet them in their own language.”