A Sense of Entitlement

Is it "a sense of entitlement" if students are actually entitled to it? To what are learners in fact entitled?

A recent Language Log post tracks the meaning of the word "entitlement" over time. I was surprised to see how early it acquired negative connotations. Originally meaning something to which a person is legitimately entitled (think of going to college on the GI bill, for example), it came quickly to be used in contexts where a person believes they are entitled to something on which they actually have no legitimate claim. The string, "…sense of entitlement…" is common.

You hear a lot in higher ed these days about the "sense of entitlement" among students, and this does point to a genuine problem. Grade inflation is real, as is a consumer mentality around education: you hear sentiments like "I pay the teacher's salary, so they have to do x for me," where x = "respect my learning style," "cut me a break because of my full-time job," "avoid offending me." (Side point: an instructor is no more employed by her learners than a waiter is employed by the guy ordering a steak.)

But are learners entitled to nothing? I'll offer today two things to which a learner is, in my view, entitled: Clarity regarding time commitments, and clarity regarding assessments.

Time commitments: A learner is entitled to know how many hours the course work is designed to take. Many of my students work long hours (usually in a church), and frankly, should either be working fewer hours or taking fewer classes ("But my scholarship requires…"). It's a real systemic problem in need of address. At the same time, we all know that being squeezed from both sides is the human condition: it's how you develop muscle, and learning to "push back" against one's employer is a survival skill.

I often say,

Here is the difference between me and your church employer. The church will never tell you it has "enough" of your time. It will always want more. Me, I will design my course in such a way that its time requirements are predictable: about so many hours of reading, about so many hours of activities. If you are spending (say) 6-8 hours each week, outside of class, on this 3-credit course, and not getting the results you want, then come see me. I won't simply say, "spend more time." I'll first work with you to help you make the most of that 6-8 hours.

Some students will, in fact, need to put in more time than others, especially if language is an issue, or they have a poor background in reading. Maybe some can only achieve sub-"A" work in the time that they have. But again, if they put in the time, they are entitled to my help on getting the most out of that time.

(Side note to instructors: do you know how many words are in your assigned readings? Do you know what reading rates are typical for your learners?)

Assessments: A learner who attempts to "meet the bar" of expectations is entitled to know where the bars are set. I am a convert to rubrics, and have all the fanaticism of a convert. No matter how carefully I try to write my expectations into paragraphs of prose, it's not enough. The fact is, I do have, in my head, 1) a list of things that I am assessing in an assignment, and 2) a mental picture of what "not good enough," "good enough," and "more than good enough" looks like for each of those things I am looking for. The learners deserve to have access to that "mental map," taken out of my head and spelled out visibly on paper. Here is an example of my assessment rubrics: the assignment is peer review. (Imagine the learners have written a draft of a paper, and are to review one another's drafts; they are graded on their peer reviews, so this is the rubric for that review.)

What challenges have I overlooked regarding time commitments and assessments? To what else, in your view, are learners "entitled"? How do you view student "entitlements"?

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[A Sense of Entitlement was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/10/08. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Brooke's Despair

This weekend I tooted an initial draft of an epigram describing a phenomenon that I would dub, "Brooke's Despair":

Early in term, feedback is most urgent, yet assessments are (early in term) most time-consuming.

On reflection, I would augment it:

Early in the term, prompt assessments are most urgent, yet most time-consuming, and most in competition with other demands.

Learners have got to get feedback into their hands as soon as possible. All of them need to assess their strategies for tackling the course work. All of them need to see how the assignment rubrics (which they have, right?) function in practice. Some of them are going to need to withdraw at some point, and need to begin to become aware of the fact (it costs more the longer you wait). In my own experience, the course has to be designed with short assignments, early in the term, graded promptly.

But assessments are most time-consuming early in the term. If I have a Teaching Assistant, we are still learning one another's routines; they are still getting to know my rubrics; they are still getting to know how I want to exchange files. Neither of us has gotten to know the learners yet. And the learners themselves are exacerbating the problem through their own problems, forgivable (students entering the course late off of the wait list; problems in student housing; books not attained by the book store) or less so (sloppy interaction with course documents or LMS).

And assessments are in competition with every other start-of-term manner of thing. Every committee has its first meeting coming up. Everything left hanging in the last term demands to be picked up again. Email boxes fill at a soul-crushing rate. The kids are also back in school, so lives at home are in transition ("Hey, Dad, I'm in accelerated math this year! Can you help me?").

Early in the term, prompt assessments are most urgent, yet most time-consuming, and most in competition with other demands.

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[Brooke's Despair was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/09/17. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Late Work

I am changing my "late work policy"...again.

My policies go through stages: I slash-and-burn down to apodictic simplicity ("Thou shalt not kill"). Then over the years, as "edge cases" or unforeseen scenarios stack up, the policy grows to resemble the casuistic laws of Exodus or Deuteronomy ("...but if…then…").

The Old

I had had my late work policy leveled to an elegant simplicity:

No late work shall be accepted (except in the case of emergency or disability documented with the office of the Dean of Students, and then at the discretion of the instructor).

Problem One: Volume.

Way, way more students than you think will turn in late work anyway. Distressingly often, they will acknowledge that they had read the policy, but assume nonetheless that there is a grace period. ("Well I just thought….," they begin. In the immortal words from Bull Durham's Crash Davis, "Don't think, Meat; just throw.") Either I cave, and that's it for my policies from then on; or I stick, and it takes only a very few of these episodes to add up to a huge overhead in time-consuming administrative fiddle-faddle. And all this time, what I want to be doing is attend to students accomplishing their work outside the blast zone of "Well I just thought..."

Problem Two: What about us oh-so-hip instructors who assign significant amounts of collaborative projects?

Late collaborative work is a nightmare. It is THE nightmare of us oh-so-hip instructors who assign these projects. The AWOL student's peers are thrown into a tailspin and have to be reassured that they won't be "dinged" for lost productivity. Then, late in the game, the slacker wants to suddenly show up and pitch in...creating more chaos than if they just stayed away from the project altogether, since they have no idea what's going on.

So. Casuistic law: Let there be separate policies for individual work and collaborative work. ("…but if the attacker did not lay in wait for him, but God let him fall into the attacker's hand…").

The New

This is what my new attempt at a late work policy might look like:

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Late or Missing Work:

Tip: plan your progress in such a way that you will have something to submit on time, even if it isn't perfect. (Fact: work drafted at the last minute is imperfect anyway.)

Individual Work: Except where noted elsewhere in the syllabus, late individual work will be penalized at a rate of one letter grade during the first 24 hours, and one letter grade during each additional interval of 24 hours.

Collaborative Work: This includes any writing to which peers are expected to reply. When somebody fails to accomplish collaborative work on time, she prevents her peers from succeeding. Penalties for late collaborative work will be assessed at the sole discretion of the teaching staff. Possible penalties include:

• a score of zero (0): this is the default penalty;
• a non-zero failing score (for example, 60%);
• score reduction at some rate based on how late the work arrives;
• loss of later opportunities for participation (for example, if the project has "moved on" without the late participant).

Learners will not be offered "make up work" to compensate for late or missing work.

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The You

So tell me: what improvements can you offer, or what experiences do you have with a late work policy?

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[Late Work was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/24. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Making Better Ancient-Language Reading Exams

Some modern-language "reading exams" reflect a sound pedagogy that 1) reflects communicative learning of the target language, 2) offers clarity of expectations for assessment. I would love to see graduate reading exams in Hebrew and Greek achieve that same pedagogical footing, incorporating an extemporaneous oral component and rubrics made available to the learner.

The "reading exam" is well known to many graduate students. Because introductory and intermediate foreign-langauge courses vary from school to school, most Ph.D. programs will ask applicants to take a reading exam to show their proficiency in a given "research language" (often German, French, Italian). In some cases, a program might ask for a similar examination for an ancient ("dead") language: in my field, for example, Hellenistic Greek or Biblical Hebrew.

Reading exams tend to vary with the idiosyncracies of the examining instructor. A departmental guideline might offer expectations or options regarding format: our own offers the student a choice of having two "unseen" texts to translate, or else having to answer comprehension questions (posed in English) on both an "unseen" text and a set of short "seen" texts. Beyond the formatting guidelines, though, expectations are usually pretty opaque. How long will it be? Will the content be related to the learner's field of study? What kinds of errors are important? Is it better to turn in an incomplete exam that is error-free in what it accomplishes, or is it better to finish with some parts left really rough? "Only the Shadow knows."

Some modern language reading exams reflect an expectation that the student has really learned to communicate extemporaneously in the target language, for example by an oral component with "Q and A" conducted in that language. To my knowledge, exams in Hebrew and Greek never include this, because so very few seminaries or divinity schools teach biblical languages using communicative-language/second-language-acquisitions methods. (The overwhelmingly common model is to teach the elementary linguistics of the target language; believe it or not, in many courses, the target material is not even read out loud by the learner.)

Here's what I would like to see in ancient language reading exams:

1. Extemporaneous, oral component: This could be small or large. At minimum, the exam itself could be simple translation, but preceded by a "social" exchange in the target language (welcoming the student, pleasantries, getting settled). At most, the entire exam could be a discussion, in the target language, of readings that have been accomplished ahead of time by the student. I might like to see an exam that splits the difference:
   • a brief social exchange in the target language;
   • simple translation of a reading not seen before by the learner;
   • a handful of comprehension questions, in the target language, concerning a reading that the learner has pre-read.
2. Rubrics for assessment: The truth is, not every mistake counts equally in assessment, and (depending on the assessor) some mistakes won't count at all. For example, an assessor might not detract from the student's score if she appears to transform a passive form into an active form while preserving the correct meaning. These matters should be agreed upon within a department, and made available to the student in a rubric.
3. Word count expectations: In a timed exam, how many words/minute can the student expect to be asked to translate? This needn't be the same for all languages and all programs, but again should be made clear in the rubric. From the very few examples I have been able to put my hand to, I think that 4+ words/minute (250/hour) is reasonable for modern research languages; for ancient languages (Latin, Hebrew, Greek) I would like to think that the same expectation is within reach, while about half that (2-3 words/minute) is usual.

The first item could only be used, of course, with a learner whose instruction has prepared her for it. The second and third items, however, should be incorporated into every program's guidelines for foreign-language reading exams.

What is your experience with "reading exams"? Does your experience with them give you grounds to critically assess my observations or suggestions?

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[Making Better Ancient-Language Reading Exams was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/22. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Participant Pedagogy: a MOOCMOOC Production

(This week, I am a learner in a Massive Open Online Course—a MOOC—that is on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses. Yes, it's a Moocmooc. Our assignment today is a short post about "participant pedagogy.")

In Jesse's post today and elsewhere, he kicks "learner-centered learning" up a notch (Emeril style!): for the course designer, it's no longer just a matter of asking, "What does the learner need in order to accomplish the learning that the course asks of her?" It goes further, asking, "What role does the learner need to take in joining in the design of the course during the course itself?" How do I design a course such that the learners, as part of their learning, make decisions about the structure and expectations of the course?

This raises for me a distinction that I have learned regarding course design: the difference between closed-ended "selected response" assessments (multiple choice, short answer, matching, true/false) and open-ended "constructed response" assessments (learning logs, presentations, discussion, portfolios, productions such as artwork). When we talk about these, we usually are talking about how to assess a student's control of a subject matter: geology, history, a language, mathematics, or whatever.

But Jesse's post makes me review the ways in which I empower students to participate in course design, and I realize that it is mostly in a "selected response" style: I allow the learners to choose among options that I have set. For example, for their final project, I will give the learners a set of rubrics that tell them what that project must accomplish, then I let them choose between, say, a thesis paper or a digital visual essay ("selected response"). What I have resisted doing is to allow them an open-ended choice: "Go ahead and come up with something that will accomplish the requirements of the rubric" ("constructed response").

My reasons for resisting this have more to do with how I perceive my own limitations than theirs: What if I fail to equip them to make good choices? (And by "good choices," I don't even mean "choices that lead to a good product"; I mean, "What if they make choices that don't even lead to a learning process? What if they don't even "fail well"?)

If you are an instructor, what kinds of "participant power" have you given your learners to shape their learning experience: closed-ended "selected response" or open-ended "constructed response"? If you are a student, what kinds of "participant power" have you been given? What kind have you wanted? What has happened as a result?

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[Participant Pedagogy: a MOOCMOOC Production was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/15. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

First Day of School! So Hit Snooze Again, Already

Everyone brush your hair, hang your name cards around your necks, and gather outside with your best neighborhood friends while your family takes pictures: it's the first day of school!

My summer session begins today. It's on online class, six weeks in length (therefore "intensive"). The course is "Introduction to the Old Testament," essentially an introduction to historical-critical and literary-critical biblical studies. There's a separate course focusing on Bible content.

Of course, "first day" is a relative term. The learners have already accomplished some minor tasks in the last weeks: logging on, doing a one-question "Choice" about whether they plan to pre-read the textbook, and taking a diagnostic quiz called "Is Online Learning for You?"

For my part, the "first day" is--quite intentionally--a bit of an anti-climax. For one thing, I haven't slept well. I never sleep well the night before the first day. It doesn't matter whether it's a face-to-face course or online. First-day jitters, I got 'em. For another, an online course is largely asynchronous: there's no three-hour block during which we've all got to be "on" for one another. Instead, we're all "on" for one another off-and-on throughout the week.

So, I've developed strategies for the "first day":

• No hunting trips: Undoubtedly there are a few students who have not accomplished all of the pre-course activities, or whose registration is in some kind of limbo. I have been in contact with them regularly in the weeks and days before the term. It's tempting (especially to us tightly-wound types) to want to get all that buttoned down. (OMG!! It's the first day!!) Forget that. Unless they reach out to me (and it's great if they do), it can wait until the second day. Or the third. Hey, it's their course.
• Get a late start: As surprising as this is to me, most of the learners have not taken a vacation day from their employer to celebrate the first day by jumping onto the LMS at dawn. Or even at nine. A few of them will bang out their Introduction before work or on lunch, but if the earliest deadline isn't until Wednesday, why shouldn't I plan to get some additional exercise on Monday morning? Eat a hot breakfast for once? Pet the dog and catch up on my Instapaper?
• Smile before Christmas: I get the thinking behind "don't smile before Christmas." I just don't accept the costs in trust, good will, and positive reinforcement. The first day is a great time to catch students doing things right and, as publicly as possible, pasting a gold star on that and posting it to the refrigerator. A new course is like any other fear-inducing new environment (say, prison, or an alcoholic home, or the Internet): noobs will have their radar up for "cues" about what will be punished and what will be rewarded. Reward is more motivating and cleaner in its outcomes, so I try to catch good behavior early on.

What have you learned about yourself and "first days"? How do your routines reflect that?

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[First Day of School! So Hit Snooze Again, Already was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/06/25. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Borrowing Syllabi: Collaborate, Re-mix, Acknowledge

A number of years back, Chris Heard posted the flowchart [link updated] by which he assessed a certain paper-writing assignment. I have mentioned before that I picked it up and modified it for my own use. At that time, I incorporated much of it into a checklist for the students to consult before submitting the paper. More recently, convinced of the value of rubrics for assessment, I have developed that into a three-column rubric. I realized recently that, some point, in the heat of revision, I had dropped my standard acknowledgment of Chris's original work.

Katharine Harris wrote recently on the value of including acknowledgments in syllabi: if we are smart, we are re-mixing assignments and assessment tools designed by others, and as an ongoing research project in curriculum, a syllabus should reflect that.

"Re-mixing" syllabi created by others (or their elements) is not different from how designers of open-source software "fork" already-existing applications: taking a tool that exists, then copying and modifying it into a new creation, is to create a new "fork" for that tool. Brian Croxell talks about "forking a syllabus," and Lincoln Muller offers tips on using GitHub—an online resource for sharing and forking software code—to collaborate on and share syllabi, assignments, and assessment tools.

I have begun developing an online lesson for faculty on the value of using plain text [in] the writing process and in collaborative writing, and a section of that lesson will include the use of GitHub for sharing modules from syllabi: policy statements, projects, assessment tools, and so on. I will plan to work out parts of that lesson here on the blog.

How have you built on tools drawn from others' syllabi? What are your habits regarding acknowledgment?

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[Borrowing Syllabi: Collaborate, Re-mix, Acknowledge was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 20121/04/18. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

The Writing Process: An Interview with a Fourth Grader

Writing is thinking.

Writers know this by hard experience. Writing is not simply reporting on thinking that has already taken place: the thinking that goes on happens by writing, or it doesn’t happen at all. It is this knowledge that brings a writer, again and again, back to a writing process.

In recent years, I have seen—anecdotally—a sharp decrease in understanding about a writing process. Otherwise excellent students can be heard to say, in the last week of the term (out loud, where people can hear), “Yes, I plan to write that 8000 words paper for Prof A  today, tomorrow, and the next day, and then I’ll write that 3000 words for Prof B in the two days after that.” It’s not laziness: you heard me say “otherwise excellent students.” It’s not simply a function of being overwhelmed: compared to earlier years, the students are not taking heavier loads or working longer hours. Rather, my sense is that, on average, fewer students have received, in their secondary and undergraduate education, a grounding in a writing process.

My current syllabus attempts to force a writing process on the students by requiring stages toward a final thesis paper, with students reviewing one another’s work at each stage:

1. Research report, written to rubrics and submitted for review to three peers;


2. Thesis statement with plan for defense, written to rubrics and submitted for peer review;


3. Complete draft, written to rubrics and submitted for peer review;


4. Final draft.

Early results have been underwhelming, with a sizable percentage of students simply failing to accomplish the research report. Again, this suggests a lack of familiarity with the benefits of a writing process: anyone who has benefitted from a writing process in the past will be eager to embrace it later when given the opportunity. At the same time, students who accomplished the research report have been eager to get to the peer review.

So now you understand why it is that, when my fourth grader, lying in bed and chatting before lights-out, began to talk about “the writing process” as they learn it in elementary school, I leapt for the laptop and began to record. Take ten minutes, and learn how it’s done.



[The Writing Process: An Interview with a Fourth Grader was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/03/22. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Being a Student: Writing for the Course

“He could have written this before ever taking my class!”

Among my rubrics for student writing is the requirement that they rigorously engage the course materials (readings, lectures, discussion) and also engage the methods taught in the course (narrative criticism, form/genre criticism, attention to historical contexts, and so on).

For introductory students, who are still trying to get a handle on just what we are reading/doing/talking about, this can at first feel a bit abstract. Recently, an exasperated colleague at another school made a comment that, in my view, offers an excellent “thumb rule” on this business of writing for the course:

“He could have written this piece before ever taking my class!”

If I had to isolate the single most common complaint that I’ve heard professors utter about student writing, it wouldn’t be about grammar and spelling, or about making deadlines, or even plagiarism. It would be this complaint, that a piece of student writing (often for a final project in the course) could have been written by the student without ever having taken the course in the first place.

So, ask yourself—early in the process of planning, and again early in the writing, and again when approaching completion—could I have written this before I ever took this course? Or am I making concrete use of the readings I’ve read, the lectures offered, the modes of inquiry that have been encouraged, the discussions facilitated in class?

Comment Thread: What Are You So Excited About?

My wife has a broken wrist, I’m limping around with plantar fasciitis, and my syllabi and rubrics stubbornly refuse to write themselves. So, let’s keep things simple this morning, and have us an open thread: What are you excited about?

Me, I’m very excited about the rubrics I’m putting together for my fall assignments. I think students are going to respond well to the clarity of expectations you get with a good page of rubrics. More detail on that in a later post.

What’s got you jazzed this morning? In your research, in your teaching, in your recreational life? Have you had a breakthrough at work lately? Lowered your golf handicap? Taught your daughter to snap her fingers? Finish grading a summer course?

Tell us briefly in the comments: What are you so excited about?

Beginning Blogging in Biblical Studies: Suggestions

Among the collaborative projects I’m assigning my introductory students this fall is blogging. (They’ll also participate in a course wiki, and do in-class collaborative work). Blogging will be mandatory, and graded. Besides a rubric for the assignment, I also wish to give them suggestions about academic blogging: what makes blogging appropriate for biblical studies and for an introductory course in Hebrew Bible?

This is my first draft. What suggestions can you offer for improvement?

Suggestions for Beginning Blogging in Biblical Studies. There is overlap between these suggestions, and the divisions are somewhat artificial. But, for the student who is still trying to learn to keep her writing within the bounds of “biblical studies,” they offer some guidelines to help stay on track.

• Summary: Summarize some resource: a chapter from the textbook; a lecture or part of a lecture; a hypothesis concerning some topic. A summary should have balance: its proportions should reflect those of its source. A summary should have a neutral point of view: it is not a review or a critique. Reading your summary, the author of the source would agree that you depict her work accurately and in terms she recognizes as her own.


• Integration: Try to integrate some new piece of knowledge with concepts you already feel you control. For example, maybe you’ve just learned about the literary genre “saga,” and you want to integrate it into what you already know about form criticism. Often, you will modify what you already think you know in order to integrate new data.


• Synthesis: There are two or more things that you’ve learned separately, and you are trying to bring them into a single coherent picture. What does X have to do with Y? Or X and Y with Z? What does the Judean “royal theology” have to do with post-exilic messianic expectations, and what (if anything) do the two have to do with apocalyptic? What do the “complaint psalms” have to do with the “dissenting wisdom” of Ecclesiastes, and what (if anything) do the two have to do with hypothetical Israelite scribal schools? This sort of work might be tentative, provisional, even speculative, but it should be clear about its line of reasoning and where its warrants are grounded in concrete evidence.


• Assessment: Here, you assess a piece of work in light of our own norms and methods of critical inquiry as they take shape in our course over the term. Suppose you’ve read an outsider’s blog entry or seen a YouTube video, and that work makes claims about the Bible or about the Bible’s historical context. Would that work pass muster in our class? Why or why not? Could its conclusions be sustained with moderate revisions to its arguments, or is it hopelessly wrong in its factual accuracy or lines of reasoning? (Your assessment should include an element of summary, according to our canons for summary described above.)


• Reflection: Here, you bring some aspect of your recent learning into conversation with your own habitual worldview or ways of talking about things. Treat it very much like “integration” above. Keep a profession tone. Avoid stream of consciousness, spiritual autobiography, and inappropriate self-disclosure. This mode should not dominate your blogging, but in proportion it can resolve tensions, enhance collaboration, and spark fresh ideas for you and others.

O readers: What sorts of additions might you make to these suggestions? What revisions, whether for clarity or otherwise? What sorts of blogging would you like your introductory students to be able to do?

Hey Profs, Show Us Your Outcomes!

I am trying to take seriously two thing. First, my own admonishment not to use the academic cliché “take seriously” in any of my writing. But second, the logical need to clarify to myself what learning outcomes I am trying for, before revising the rubrics for my assignments.

The wording of my outcomes is not yet important to me; it’s okay if they are sloppy or a bit rambling. For example, in “Introduction to the Old Testament”:

1. Students will become fearless researchers in the field, getting over the “but I’m not a scholar” mental hump, and also the “but what if I find something that upsets my faith” hump.


2. Students will embrace collaboration, eschewing narrow competitiveness or fearful isolation and growing into the conviction that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” As Harry Tuttle put it, “We’re all in it together, kid.” I do well if we do well, and we do well if I do well.


3. Students will comprehend the difference between “Bible study” (devotional, expository; our theologies about the Bible; not primarily what we’re doing) and “biblical studies” (exegetical, literary and historical; the theologies discerned in the texts; what we are primarily doing).


4. Students will learn the details of the different historical situations in Canaan between the 13th and 2nd centuries B.C.E. They will be able to talk clearly about why those differences matter to how we exegete specific biblical texts.


5. Students will get a sense that, if they ever want to interpret the Bible with anything resembling authority, they are going to have to take Elementary Hebrew 1 and 2 the following year.


6. Student will just love the living bejeezus out of the Hebrew Bible.

[Edit: changed list from bullets to numbered list.]

I have other outcomes taking shape for Elementary Hebrew.

Readers, if you teach any courses at all, what are they and what learning outcomes are essential to you? If you do not teach, what learning outcomes have you experienced as essential, or what outcomes do you wish had been prioritized?

Out of the Belly of Grading I Cried

The cords of Grading are wrapped around my neck,
The snares of Grading confront me.

I have gone where there is no blogging
Nor memory of blogging.

Until the LORD brings me up alive from Grading,
Restoring me to life from those who go down into the Office,

You may as well stop by Four Stone Hearth 67,
Visit the anthropology news of which Duane makes me aware.