Summer vacation may be upon us, but that doesn’t mean that the learning need stop. Consider getting the youngsters in your life Alpha is for Anthropos, an illustrated text designed to teach children—and Greekless grownups—their Alpha-Beta-Gammas.
This is not the kind of book that admits of ready abuse, perhaps because the author, Therese Sellers, a former classics teacher, took care to conceive it with philosophic sensitivity. Tasked with teaching Greek to her four-year-old godson, Sellers despaired of her friend’s “misguided” request to instruct such a young pupil. After some reflection, it hit her:
And so she found “A playful and joyful way to make Greek vocabulary, words, and syntax stick in the mind of a small child” through the use of well-known nursery rhymes and accompanied by illustrations designed to “provide a way into the art of Greek vase painting.”
Take the letter Psi. Sellers uses Psi to introduce the word psychē, or soul, and reproduces what sounds, if read in monotone, like the incantation of a priestess whose sermons routinely bore the whole polis. But read with a bit of a lilt and superimposed onto the tune of “Here We Go Looby Loo” and you have lesson plan even the most cunning little Odysseus won’t see coming.
And so it goes with each letter of the Greek alphabet. From Alpha, sung to the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” to Omega and “What Can The Matter Be?,” the reader rollicks along pausing, perhaps, to lament a wasted youth spent on Raffi and “Baby Beluga.”
Therese’s sister, Lucy, keeps the trireme sailing with visually simple, yet vibrant drawings. Below her accompaniment of the letter Psi is a Greek warrior grasping at a butterfly, an insect identified with the soul. Sellers doesn’t outright explain the images (but for a sentence or two in the notes on the illustrations in the back), thereby playfully enticing educators to use their imagination while teaching.
With Alpha is for Anthropos, Sellers accomplishes the rare feat of having produced a book from which human beings can, irrespective of age, learn from with proportional vigor—a noble example worthy of the finest teachers in Lyceums both ancient and modern.
