Balancing Pose

Retooling Greek for Parish Ministry

I'm teaching a Kairos continuing education class at Luther Seminary this month on how to get your Greek serviceable again if it's been a while since you worked with it. Here's the schedule, pending approval from the Kairos office. You can register here.

Retooling Greek for Parish Ministry

June 21-25, 2010

Luther Seminary - Stub Hall Lounge

Mary Hinkle Shore, professor of New Testament

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Monday

                                                      1-2:30 p.m.     Welcome, Introductions, Shape of the Week; Vocabulary

                                                      2:30-2:45 p.m.      Break

                                                2:45-3:40 p.m.            The Article

                                                      3:40-3:50 p.m.      Break

                                                      3:50-4:40 p.m.      Verbs

                                                      4:40 p.m.     Class ends

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Tuesday

                                                      8:30-9:45 a.m.      Participles

                                                      10 a.m.    Chapel and Break

                                                      10:45 a.m.    Little Words: Prepositions, Conjunctions, & Particles

                                                      12:15 p.m.    Class ends

   1:30-3:00 p.m.     Optional afternoon session on BibleWorks software

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Wednesday

                                                      8:30-9:45 a.m.      Infinitives, Nouns & Adjectives, Pronouns

                                                      10 a.m.   Chapel and Break

                                                      10:45 a.m.     Studying Words: Using Concordance Tools & Lexicons

                                                      12:30 p.m.     Class ends

   1:30-3:00 p.m.      Optional afternoon session on Accordance Bible software

            ________________________________________________________________________

Thursday

                                                      8:30-9:45 a.m.      Process for Greek in Sermon Preparation (using texts for Fifth Sunday after Pentecost).

                                                      10 a.m.     Chapel and Break

                                                      10:45 a.m.   Process for Greek in Sermon Preparation, part two.

                                                      12:15 p.m.    Class ends

   1:30-3:00 p.m.       Optional afternoon session on web tools for Greek study

                                                      ________________________________________________________________________

Friday

                                                      8:30-9:45 a.m.      Process for Using Greek in Bible Study Preparation

                                                      10 a.m.     Chapel and Break

                                                      10:45 a.m.    Resource Fair & Further Study Options

                                                      12:30 p.m.    Class ends

Required Reading

Webb, Joseph M. and Robert Kysar, Greek for Preachers. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002.

Shore, Mary Hinkle. “How Do I Keep My Greek (or Get It Back)?” Working Preacher, posted 11/16/09. URL http://www.workingpreacher.org/texts.aspx?article_id=278, accessed May 31, 2010.

Other Resources

The bookstore will have two laminated Greek study guides on hand from Zondervan, an introductory one by William Mounce and an intermediate one by Daniel Wallace.

What Professors Wish Students Knew about Grading

It is the hardest part of the job. As we near the end of the semester, I am reminded again of the agony of paper grading for all concerned.

I experienced the roller coaster of curiosity, fear, joy, irritation, etc. first from the perspective of a student: I still remember several comments that were written on papers I turned in during my academic career. In 1982, a professor commented that a paper meant to fulfill the requirement of writing my Christology was "really more of a soteriology,"  and he gave me a B+ for the course. In 1984, another professor wrote at the end of a paper I wrote on antinomianism in the Lutheran Reformation, "More of a dalliance than a paper, but a fine one and fun besides." I had to look up the word, "dalliance." At the time, it seemed unlikely to me that it was a compliment. 

Now as a professor, I wish students could have a bit better understanding of what we go through when offering feedback on papers. So here is my list.

1. I understand that timely feedback honors your work and offers the most potential for significant learning and continued conversation. I also have about one and a half times as much to do as I can fit into a day. My guess is that you have some idea what this sort of schedule is like. I'm not delaying in order to torture you. I'm honestly working as fast as I can.
2. Understand that marginal notes and comments on papers are like email in this way: tone is hard to convey and easy to misconstrue. One of my friends once called me up to read, with rage, a comment he had received on a paper. The teacher had written, "This is good as far as you go...." When he was reading the comment to me over the phone, he realized for the first time that she had probably meant for the emphasis to be on the idea that there was more to say--the paper had not gone as far as it might have. When he first read the comment, however, he heard her saying, "This is good as far as you go..., as if she knew better than to expect stellar work from him.
3. In any given class or on any given assignment, you may not be judged an A student. This does not mean that no one will ever love you, or that God has abandoned you, or that you should just reconcile yourself to a life of failure. Figure out the scale of the problem and then see if you can match the scale of your response to that. 
4. Related to the previous point, I am not God, so stop giving my comments as much weight as you would a theophany. As much as I might like it, I do not have power over whether the rest of your day, or week, or life is good unless you give it to me. No single grade keeps anyone out of a Ph. D. program. No single paper casts your future into stone.
5. I do not pull punches when I am reading papers. I try not to be hurtful, but I have no interest in lying to you. Everyone's work could be improved. Part of my job is pointing out where your paper could be better.
6. It is not personal. I don't know you that well, and I don't think about you that much.
7. I tell myself every time I sit down with a stack of papers, "First, do no harm." Even so, of course, I do. I might say something ridiculous or hurtful on your paper. I ask that you judge my intention to be ridiculous or hurtful on the basis of the whole interaction we have had over weeks or years, rather than on the basis of one paper's comments.
8. I could be wrong. I am wrong at least a few times a day, and that habit might one day be displayed in the margin of your paper. If something bothers you, talk to me.

The professor is neither God nor the Enemy. The professor is just a teacher. When grading, the professor is reading as quickly as possible through a stack of papers and trying to say something helpful on each one. The task is fraught with danger.

Now that I have said my piece, I wonder what students wish professors knew about grading. I await your comments.

What do you use your laptop for in class?

Over at Free Range Learning, Luther Seminary's Learning Design and Technology blog, I just posted a piece for professors on how to work with the phenomenon of laptops and wireless access in classrooms. In a nutshell, I proposed "Lids Down" times as well as a few methods for keeping students engaged in what is going on in the class, whether they have a laptop open or not.

I'd be interested in what students think of these tips for professors.

More on Grading and Greek

All of my grading for 2008 is done. I mailed out the last of the New Testament Greek finals today. At Luther Seminary, we are on a Pass-Marginal-Fail scale, so all except two students received a Pass as their grade.

Post Mortem

In addition to Saturday's thoughts, I noticed these things about the take-home Greek final (.doc) and its results:

1. Everyone got better as they progressed through the final. Almost every section in a single paper was better than the last. This is gratifying if it means that the assignment gave students the kind of practice they needed to demonstrate the skills that the test asked for.
2. Clearly we did not do enough graded translation through the term. I had not been asking for this because I couldn't see the point in students doing their own halting translation of texts that are in the NT. It would be better, I thought, to be able to differentiate what various translations were doing rather than try to create one's own. Now, I think that we need to struggle with translation just to get familiar enough with the language even to understand what is behind the differences in published translations.
3. Probably 6 out of 29 students quoted directly from BibleWorks resources like Metzger, Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, without using quotation marks. I doubt they were trying to deceive, but still I'm surprised that college graduates wouldn't know better. 

Revisions to the Class

BibleWorks

I am going to stick with BibleWorks as a course requirement. It's an amazing tool. It makes all sorts of searches and text comparisons possible in the blink of an eye. Especially now that BibleWorks 8 comes with Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics unlocked, it will be a fine resource for our Greek and other New Testament classes.

Graded Translations

I'm going to ask for weekly translations, along with answers to questions about the sentences' grammar. We had grammar quizzes each week in the fall term class, but very little in terms of translations due. I stopped doing grammar after Week 8 so we could read texts in groups during Weeks 9-12. We didn't get through the last 8 lessons or so in Croy, A Primer of Biblical Greek, and after we left explicitly studying grammar, people seem to have forgotten it ever existed. I think it will be an improvement to keep reading and grammar concepts mixed together throughout all 13 weeks of the course.

I'll also draw more attention to Jim Boyce's Grammar Notes (.pdf). This is a great, short resource on things like how cases work and how participles may be translated, etc. The students who cited this resource in their finals did the best job on the test.

Citation Technique

Faculty at LS are guilty of always expecting someone else to teach proper citation technique, to which I say, "OK, I give up! I'll be the change I want to see in the world!" I'm going to talk about citation and plagiarism even in Greek class, using these resources:

The Shortcut to Turabian (.pdf). This is Luther Seminary's current style sheet/citation manual.

"Citation and Use of Sources" (.pdf). This is a tidy resource from our own Writing Center.

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Teaching Greek, Grading Papers

I am almost exactly halfway through the 29 final papers for this fall's New Testament Greek class. Here's what I'm learning about the class we all just finished.

• Students are best at doing concordance (BibleWorks) searches and discovering interesting things about word use that way. One student discovered that "son of Man" was almost exclusively in the gospels when it appears in the NT. Others have discovered, as they analyze Mark 2:1-12 for instance,  just how rare it is for Jesus to say, "Your sins are forgiven." Might we be more focused on sin and forgiveness than Jesus was?
• Everyone seems to think that because the lexicon shows a broad range of meaning for a word, the word must have a "far out" meaning in their particular text. It's as if all lexicon meanings are created equal, and it's really cool, when you're translating, to decide a word means something almost unintelligible in English. It's like cheering for the underdog or something. Where did this idea come from?
• Almost everyone is failing the grammar portion of the final project. They can translate pretty well with BibleWorks open (it must be sort of like using an interlinear for translation). But students generally have no idea what elements of grammar are particularly relevant to the meaning of a text--or even which ones should be particularly puzzling to someone with their level of Greek language skill.
• With respect to grammar, I'm most troubled by two areas of expertise that seem to be missing: (1) Beyond noticing subjects in the nominative and direct objects in the accusative, no one is recognizing what is packed into the use of a particular case. (2) Most people have no facility with translating a participle with anything but "-ing."

All in all, it seems to me that maybe two of the 12 tests I've graded give evidence of someone actually inhabiting the language well enough to get how it creates meaning. The other tests demonstrate capacity to search in BibleWorks and to read the little boxed parsing and vocabulary information that comes up when you hover over a word in BW.

Where to next semester? I will post some ideas when I've finished grading.