Gel Pens and Candy and Hot Tea in Kettle

…slippers and music of all kinds but metal.*

What are a few of your own favorite things, when in a grading marathon?

* (I was a Zeppelin loyalist during the metal years.)

SBL 2009 Presentation

In this movie, I record the content of the presentation I gave to the section, “Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies,” at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (New Orleans, 2009).

The title of the presentation is, “‘…Even Bearing Gifts’: The Contribution of Distance Learning Strategies to the Brick-and-Mortar Classroom.”

The movie runs about 28 minutes. A list of the resources that I mention, including links to some of Michael Wesch’s content, can be found here: /educators/resources-from-presentation/

[wpvideo iBvX5H18]

It's a Sign of the Times

So this is what it takes for me to have a moment to blog: my students taking a one-hour exam. What do I want to say in this golden moment?

This: When I think of the spring term, in which my teaching load will be greatly reduced from the lunatic schedule I’m on now, I most look forward to writing on the Bible. Right now, I'm teaching all the time, so in my brain it’s all-pedagogy-all-the-time. Great, but by now there’s an imbalance in the Force: after a summer and fall of thinking and writing about teaching, I have a yen for wide-open Bible spaces. (And maybe brush off my Egyptian. Wide open Bible and Egyptian spaces.)

Will next term be different for you in some way? And how will it?

RBoC: "Endless October" Edition

The calendar has turned, and the weather gone from  “all rain all the time” to “all chilly rain all the time,” but plus ça change, plus c'est toujours l'October.


On my plate:

• apply for work (’tis the season)


• prepare SBL presentation


• write overdue report for distance-learning committee


• hey, I preach next week


• grade midterms for Intro to OT


• grade midterms for Hebrew


• write midterm feedback for Intro to OT blogging


• get caught up podcasting lectures for Intro to OT


• oversee peer review of midterm papers in Intro to OT

Plus the usual stuff in the personal sphere, including but not limited to:

• keep the Boy involved in Cub Scout achievements


• help the Boy prepare for his next Taekwon-do promotion test

The next time I look up, I’ll be on a plane for New Orleans. Then I’ll blink, and be grading final exams. Should I just start humming Advent tunes now?

Student Hebrew/ Greek Reading Groups

From time to time, some of my “Elementary Hebrew” or “Elementary Greek” alums will put together a reading group to try to retain (or get back) their hard-earned skills. The besetting challenge is, of course, time: most of them are either still taking classes or have graduated into demanding jobs. Last evening, some of us met to begin another swat at a Hebrew reading group. As usual, it was fun and fruitful. Students who elect to take biblical languages are, on average, a fun crowd (in my admittedly idiosyncratic view).

Typically, we won’t expect any preparation, and plan to meet weekly with the understanding that anyone might have to bail on any given week. Sometimes groups plan to meet during the day, perhaps in the cafeteria or a faculty office (lunches are often the best time). This group is meeting in the evenings, which makes it more entertainingly social—a plus, I’d say—but also means that more folks are having to commit to a drive in (rather than simply walking from one campus building to another).

I love student reading groups. The mere fact that students want to carve a bit of time from their lunatic schedules to improve their reading brings joy to an educator’s heart. Also, there’s that sense of application: I saw how hard they’ve worked to learn the stuff, and they deserve the reward of putting it to some use. Finally, it’s a chance for me also to be involved in reading that’s done just for its own sake: especially when I’m teaching introductory classes, I mostly read the Bible for the narrow tasks associated with prepping and teaching those courses.

Have you had experience with student reading groups in Hebrew or Greek (or any other languages, for that matter)? What has worked for you, what hasn’t, and what do you enjoy most about them?

"A Diploma-less Monkey"?

Really, it makes me wonder why I took up evil, er, I mean Bible, in the first place. I guess academic PTSD never really goes away.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqtAyNGcPiY] (update: disabled)

(And yes, I really enjoy watching Phineas and Ferb. My wife calls it “This generation’s Rocky and Bullwinkle.” As Disney programs go, it’s not about dating, kissing, and the objectification of girls. Oh, and no Selena Gomez.)

"And What Was I Doing All Those Years?"

I see that Gary Manning at Eutychus joins me in appreciating Rowley’s quote about preaching and biblical languages.

Prowling around Gary’s site, I’m happy to find also some pointed words that Wesley had to say on the subject. Seminarians and preachers, take note! If you must preach or teach, then either learn your biblical languages or endure Wesley’s scornful wrath.

What Would You Be Doing…

…if it weren’t October and you weren’t snowed under by emails, grading, advising, letters of reference, and committee obligations?

(Perhaps it’s some other set of circumstances bogging you down: just fill that in here and continue.)

Indoors: I’d be learning my way into Mesopotamian and Egyptian astrological texts to find out more about Orion in the ancient night sky (self link).

Outdoors: I’d help the Boy get more practice at his pitching for fall baseball (44 feet from rubber to plate): we are getting out, but not enough.

How about you? What would you be doing, indoors or outdoors?

Student Hebrew Bible Wiki (in progress)

One of my introductory Hebrew Bible classes has been producing a wiki at Wetpaint.com. The wiki is meant to be a resource in Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in the study of the Hebrew Bible.

The work is in progress, and is weighted toward Writings and Latter Prophets. (This is all they've learned yet: in fact, they were learning the wiki during the Writings, and so Job, for example, never got in). This is the first time almost any of the students have been involved in a wiki of any kind, and they have picked it up admirably.

Anybody may view the wiki, but only members of the class may contribute to it.

Go and have a look if you like!

Podcast Ideas in Hebrew Bible

Not very long ago, Chris Heard canvassed his readers for suggestions about short podcasts on topics in Hebrew Bible: you can see the results for yourself. Mark Goodacre’s NT Pod continues to be well-received (and no surprise).

I have a lecture series in progress, geared toward my introductory students and designed to accompany a traditional course in Hebrew Bible. Each lecture is a podcast episode comprising a pair of 25–30-minute halves. The podcasts are slide-enhanced, and in *.m4a format, playable by iTunes, iPod, or QuickTime, and with some help from Blackboard can be viewed on a web browser as well. In their current revision, I consider them as still in “beta,” and I don’t plan to publish them to public directories until I’ve done some clean-up on them.

I would like, though, to plan a different kind of series, more after the pattern being laid down by Mark and Chris: 5–12-minute episodes, audio only, on manageable critical issues in biblical studies. I wouldn’t begin until Spring 2010, but I would like to begin thinking of ideas. Chris got good results on his query, so I am asking the same: what topics would you like to see addressed in such a format? Some ideas I already like are:

• What are Old Testament Pseudepigrapha?


• What is Apocalyptic?


• Emergence of Israel in the Land, in four parts: chronology, rapid conquest model, gradual infiltration model, revolt model


• DtrH and Redaction Criticism


• Walls of Jericho


• Finkelstein’s “Low Chronology”


• “Satan” in the OT


• YHWH, El, and Baal


• YHWH and “his Asherah”


• Who is Job’s “redeemer”?


• What is the Exile?


• ?

The audience would be about the same as that (apparently) envisioned by Mark: the intellectually curious layperson or the scholar outside of his own fields of expertise.

What would you like to see in a series of short podcasts in the academic study of the Hebrew Bible?

Disrespect in the Classroom

Dr. Crazy writes a post on dealing with disrespect from students, whether from individuals or a group. Her main point is that male professors come across blatant disrespect in the classroom more occasionally, while for women it’s more like a predictable, quarterly grind.

Both the post and comments include testimony on kinds of in-class disrespect and ways of addressing it. As usual, I appreciate Crazy’s hard-earned judgments. In her experience, calling the behavior out explicitly and rejecting it as inappropriate is the only way to nip it in the bud, whereas a policy of appeasement ends up serving nobody.

Go read the post and comments if the subject is of interest, whether you are a teacher or student.

What sorts of disrespect have you seen in the classroom—anything from teacher-directed stuff like challenging the syllabus, to killing one’s peer’s right to a collaborative classroom by refusing to engage the material in discussion? Any stories, with or without resolutions?

Follow-Up: Lecturing Like Steve Jobs

I posted once before on the ways lecturers can learn from accomplished presenters; the prompt was an essay by Carmine Gallo about making presentations like Steve Jobs does.

Gallo’s book on the subject has become available: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs (Amazon). The book is inductive and practical: always beginning with specific examples of Jobs’ successes, Gallo names the strategies he sees working for Jobs and generalizes them for popular use. For example, Apple’s 1984 advertisement provides an antagonist against which to establish one’s product as the heroic protagonist. The principles isolated by Gallo are arranged into three “acts”: 1) Create the Story; 2) Deliver the Experience; 3) Rehearse and Refine.

This is not a become-interesting-quick manual. There is no five-step or 12-step program offered. Instead, 18 principles culled from Jobs’ most successful presentations are sensibly arranged for long-term study, experimentation, and practice.

As with the earlier weblink (which only scratches the surface of the content of the book), I find application to academic lecturing everywhere in the book. I will leave to a later post the question of whether teaching involves “selling” a subject matter. (Among the problems I see in that idea is the error-ridden notion that, if the prof fails to “sell” the student on the course material, then the student has the right not to “buy into” the course expectations.) I will provisionally claim, though, that lecturing includes an irreducible element of selling.

As we know, many Bible-bloggers are presenting at SBL/AAR New Orleans (thanks, Daniel and Tonya). In December, we’ll see a slough of posts about bad practices in academic presentations. Don’t let yours be among those examples! Instead, ask yourself now how Steve Jobs would present deuteronomistic editing in Jeremiah…or stratum 5a/4b at Megiddo…or gender-bending in the Joseph novella…or materes in late pre-exilic Hebrew inscriptions…or misogyny in military taunt genres…or…or….

Blackboard Rant

I’ve taken hours of training in Blackboard. According to the level of instruction I’ve had, I am an “expert.” I like software, and am accustomed to learning new interfaces.

Yet: I cannot understand Blackboard-ese, I cannot make it do two-thirds of what its documentation promises me it can do, and when I can, I hate how it’s done.

Reading the Textbook with an Open Bible

Typically, in an “Introduction to Bible” or “Introduction to Old/New Testament” sort of class, the student is expected to read weekly in a textbook and also in the Bible. However, some students find themselves reading through a chapter of the textbook without the content seeming to “stick,” or gain traction, with them. Others will find themselves getting bogged down in confusing biblical material, blowing a lot of time on (say) the Book of Jeremiah, without much payoff in their understanding of critical issues in that material.

I regularly suggest that students read the textbook with an open Bible. The textbook will regularly cite the biblical texts, usually in the context of making some critical point. “In Jeremiah 7:4-14, we can see the prophet’s attack on his opponents, who are convinced of the Temple’s inviolability and therefore unimpressed by the Babylonian threat on the horizon.” At this point, the student should read Jeremiah 7:4-14, checking to see 1) that the textbook is reading the Bible correctly, and 2) whether the student is understanding the textbook correctly. The student should do this with all of the Bible references in the textbook.

In the above example, the student may also find that related aspects of the course work are reinforced: the fall of Israel (where Shiloh is) to the Assyrians, for example.

“But reading the textbook already takes so long: now it will take longer!” Will it really? Perhaps, but with a net gain in time. By the time a student has read the textbook on, say, the last years of the first Temple, she will not only have already “skimmed” the whole book of Jeremiah, but will have done so with attention to critically significant texts, in the context of an informed discussion (with the textbook) about those critical issues. So, there’s the main part of the assignment to read Jeremiah, checked off the “to do” list.

Also, the words of the textbook are now gaining traction for the reader: by “checking up” on the textbook’s claims about the Bible, the student is out of a purely passive, receptive mode of reading, and into a dialogic, critical, active mode of reading. Additionally, related critical issues are being brought into synthesis with the material at hand (“where is Shiloh? why is it destroyed?”). This kind of active learning is what makes material “stick.”

Have you tried “reading the textbook with an open Bible”?

Student Bible Blogging

My students have been blogging for a few weeks now. Feel free to pay them a collegial visit and see what they’re doing. One of my classes can be found here, in the boxes called “Blogging A,”, “Blogging B,” and so on through D. Another of my classes can be found here, in the box called “Course Blogging.” Each student has her own blog, but posts tagged with our course numbers are collected via RSS feed to our shared NetVibes page.

Their assignment is to engage the materials and methods of the course, which is pretty standard “Intro to Hebrew Bible” stuff except that we did the Writings first, and are now on Latter Prophets. Coming up yet are Former Prophets and only then the Torah.

Just managing to start a blog and get posting was a new challenge for most of my students of all ages. They are all to be congratulated for stepping up and experimenting with public writing. Enjoy visiting them, be respectful and supportive, and have fun.

Blasphemy Day (One Day Late Edition)

I missed Blasphemy Day yesterday. Again. I’ll have to send Blasphemy one of those embarrassing “sorry I missed your special day” cards. But looking back on the day, a couple of things come to mind:

I did get to teach on polytheism and henotheism in select texts of the Hebrew Bible, so there was that. Nothing like a little biblical polytheism to wake up the back row.

I enjoyed a nice conversation with some other teachers on the peculiar pastoral aspect of theological education, whereby we seek to persuade students to find the courage to give up the God/Jesus/Moses/faith that they walk in with, in order that they can find her/him/it through our shared learning endeavors.

{fainting couch}Polytheistic Bibles! Taking God out of the schools!{/fainting couch}

So I guess it turned out to be a happy Blasphemy Day after all. Another Blasphemy Day miracle!

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?

Random Colin: the Bible Isn’t a bible

Random Colin has a post up called, “The Bible isn’t a bible…” It’s in part about what the Bible is not (an instruction manual) and also what the Bible is. By all means have a look.

Something I find myself saying to my students, repeatedly and in different ways, is that we have to begin biblical studies by discovering what the Bible is (as opposed to whatever we might already think the Bible is). This discovery does not happen all at once, but rather happens over time, and only by one means: reading, reading, reading. The discoveries are piecemeal, but add up: the prophets prove not to spend all their time predicting the future; the Psalms are not so bland and nicey-nice as our lectionaries suggest; Job is neither silent nor uncomplaining; the Law doesn’t include much law; the Canaanites of Jericho don’t trust in their faboo wall. The more one actually reads the Bible, the more one says, “What gives?” And as surely as the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, “What gives?” is the beginning of knowledge.

I’d gotten the heads-up on Colin from Bryan at Hevel and John at Ancient Hebrew Poetry. I’ve been reading him for a while now, and have now also and belatedly added him to my blogroll. While you are over there reading about what the Bible is and is not, browse some other posts for a bit.

[Later: I see Colin has moved to WordPress. Here is the link to The Bible isn’t a bible…, and to his Home Page.]

“Audience” and Student Writing

To whom should a student imagine herself writing, when doing her course work? At least, she’ll want to know how much knowledge of the subject matter she can presuppose on her reader’s part. Further, a writer naturally imagines a hearer: an interlocutor to her line of reasoning, a narratee to her narration.

In my experience, the usual reflex is to imagine the professor as the audience. This makes a kind of sense: the work is actually to be read by the professor, of course. And, the professor created the assignment in the first place, so doing the thing feels like an “answer” to that.

However, many students will already know some drawbacks of imagining the professor as their reader. For one thing, the professor’s knowledge of the field of study will usually so far exceed the student’s that the student has no idea what prior knowledge or presuppositions to assume for that reader…not to mention the creeping fear that the prof will know some bit of data that totally demolishes whatever line of reasoning the student has gone out onto the limb with in her writing. Further, the student may have negative, fearful, or ambivalent feelings about the professor. The conditions for good writing are delicate, and as easily frightened away as shy woodland creatures: the imposing shadow of the prof-as-reader can all too easily paralyze the writer before she can really get started.

At the same time, I don’t think that the utterly uninformed layperson—what I think of as the “tabula rasa” audience—is a much better alternative. If the imagined audience has no prior knowledge of the subject matter, then the student writer feels compelled to explain every little thing to the nth degree…and the work becomes unmanageable. Also, this “tabula rasa” audience is rather amorphous. I prefer a nice, clear audience in my head.

For my part, I suggest that in their writing, my students imagine a strong colleague as their audience. That is, some one (or two, or three) classmates who have kept up on the reading, heard the lectures, participated in the discussions, and have sought to make connections between the different elements of the subject matter. This solves the question of prior knowledge: the writer does not have to explain every little thing, but insofar as her research has led her to information not covered in class, she should bring that data into relation with her classmate’s body of knowledge. The “strong colleague” is (or can be) a positive figure to hold in one’s mind, and emulating that mental audience is an attainable goal: the “strong colleague” is like the writing student herself at her imagined best. In the writing that she is doing at that point in time, the “strong colleague” represents the best of what she is trying to be.

What do you think of the “strong colleague” as an imagined audience for student writing? What sorts of audiences have you imagined for yourself when you write, and with what results?

Blagging: Hebrew Students

Very busy, but not too busy to blag on my introductory Hebrew class a bit.

We’ve had four sessions together, doing exercises that are entirely oral/aural: no aleph-bet, no labels or signs, no text at all. Also, I’ve offered no translations for what they are saying: they pick it up through Total Physical Response and context. After four sessions, they are able handily to:

• Greet one another, ask each other’s names, ask after one another’s well being, and answer that they are very well, well, not bad, or not so well, and promise to see one another later;


• Tell me whether the book(s) or animals(s) are big or small, and which are which; whether they can or cannot see the book(s) or animal(s); whether the book(s) or animal(s) are under the table;


• Follow commands (singly or in groups) to stand, walk to the door, open or close the door, walk around a table, return to the chair(s), and sit; they can also narrate themselves or other students doing the same, both in a progressive present and in the past (I know those aren’t the categories they’ll learn in the grammar, but it’s more or less how they’ll be thinking of them at this point).


• Sing, from memory, the Hammotsi (blessing over bread), the Shema, and (just about all of) the blessing sung before the Torah reading in a Sabbath service.

I’m genuinely impressed with how comfortably they are working with the language. Remember that several elements of what they’re doing won’t even be covered in their grammar until Lesson 9, or 12, or even 18. This year, I have some new ideas about how to preserve some continuity as we learn the script and get into the more conventional, grammar-centered part of the course next week.

Teachers: which of your students do you want to blag about? Students: what are you accomplishing that you want to blag about in the comments?