I’ve had the experience of alternately learning and teaching languages online for about 5, hedging on 6, years now. I’ve learnt, and taught, 1-to-1, 1-to-many, though never many-to-1 (I’m not sure that’s a model that helps anybody!). I’ve worked in classes in 5 different languages. All of this, I think, gives me a little bit of insight into some of the ups and downs of online teaching of languages. Here are some of my reflections.

• Video is not essential, but it’s very helpful

I say this because actually looking at someone and engaging with them is tremendously helpful. We’re engaged in communication here, and putting faces to voices is part of what elevates this from talking on the phone. I do have students and teachers who leave video off, often for reasons of increasing internet reliability and speed, and that is fair enough. But to the extent that it is possible, having video on and having that the main thing on screen is the optimal set-up.

• It’s easy for any party to be distracted

Which is related to number two. It’s very easy, sitting in front of a computer, to be ‘distractable’. To drift off to other things. On the part of the teacher this is very unprofessional, and on the part of a student it’s to your own disadvantage. I suggest shutting down every other program you can. Don’t leave things minimised or running in the background.

It can be useful to have other files open, so there is an argument for some minimal use of other windows/tabs. If so, it’s not a bad idea to be up-front about this – because if you can tell that the other person appears to be ‘doing’ something rather than interacting with you directly, this is very off-putting. For my part, I sometimes have the text under discussion up, and sometimes I’ll have a dictionary program or webpage open for checking things on the fly.

• Not all teachers are created equal

I’ve had great teachers and I’ve had bad ones. The worst had no video, appeared distracted, and I am pretty sure counted some lessons that were cancelled as part of our ‘block’. I didn’t continue with him. Great teachers are knowledge, friendly, engaged, and are making a good go at the online platform work.

I don’t think I’m a great online language teacher. I don’t think I’m terrible, but it’s not my preferred medium, as I explain below.

• Timezones!

Assuming that participants are at least in northern and southern hemispheres (typically my experience), the time difference can alter by up to 2 hours (as one timezone starts Daylight Savings/Summer Time, and the other timezone ends it). Here are my tips for dealing with this: (1) plan in advance. Don’t leave it up to the other person to work out these details, make sure you’re on top of them yourself (whether you’re instructor or student). (2) Calendar programs can help – I use google calendar, and it has a feature to set the time-zone of an event. So I’ll often put in tutoring sessions based on the other person’s timezone. Then, when timezones shift, it automatically appears shifted in my calendar and I can either adjust when it is for me or for them, with discussion. (3) http://www.timeanddate.com/ is a great website that let’s you save your own personal clocks, and it has a feature called “International Meeting Planner” that helps you line up times across zones. This is my go-to tool for keeping track of multiple timezones and meetings.

• It’s not ideal, but it can work.

Why online language learning at all? Often there’s not a better option. My Gaelic improved immensely from online classes, because I gained a speaking context for a language I’d predominantly learnt with books. I have one Mongolian student who just doesn’t have many other options for learning Mongolian. The internet makes possible language learning that otherwise could not take place, and it enables communication and a verbal exchange that might otherwise not exist. That’s why it can work.

But it’s not my ideal. Personally I’d rather teach languages in small groups of 4-6, in person. All the TPR, TRPS, CI, WAYK type stuff that I love is quite difficult to do online. Without shared space, shared context, and physical embodiment, many of the things that make the first levels of language instruction concrete and comprehensible, I find, are forced to recede and a more ‘grammatical’ approach takes over. For some of my students, that’s fine – I’m tutoring them alongside or in conjunction with a grammar approach and so I’m not trying to fight that. I wish I could solve all the problems of online language instruction, but I suspect that for me to do so would require more in-person teaching experience first, to bring to the online platform.

I’d love to hear some other thoughts, experiences, questions.

Not really a state of the projects, since most of my projects have been sidelined recently…

My wife and I just had a baby girl, Sorcha (here if you want some pronunciation help), who turned up a few weeks early. Wonderful times but it did throw a spanner in my scheduling. So I’ve been off for 2 weeks, and have been investing my time in first-language acquisition by doing my best to talk to her in Gaelic.

Alas, now I am back at the office, and back to work on the thesis. I finished up a draft of chapter 3 a few weeks prior, which focuses on partitive exegesis in Basil and Hilary. Everyone talks about partitive exegesis, but no one actually talks about it, they just mention it in  passing and assume that ‘all the cool (pro-Nicene) kids are doing it these days’. So I’m currently working on a journal article that surveys partitive exegesis across pro-Nicene authors. This is my big plan to change the 0 pertinent journal publications to the magical 1 figure on my underserved resume.

I’ve almost finished drafting chapter 4 as well. Chapter 4 examines the exegesis of the Johannine prologue in Hilary and Basil. I’m hopeful that I can finish a draft of that just after Easter, and that this will put me close to 50% drafted. Given that I still plan to submit in August if humanly possible, it’s a busy time ahead.

Yesterday (well, today if you’re living in the past like the USA) is/was International Mother Language Day, and I thought I’d write some thoughts about it.

My mother tongue is English. I sometimes wish it wasn’t, but it is just an accidence [sic] of history that it is so, and in terms of the geopolitical state of the 21st century, a pretty good advantage to have. English, for various historical reasons, is our world’s dominant language and conveys huge benefits for those who possess it. It also achieved that dominance through a complicated and ethically-fraught history involving a lot of colonialism, subjugation, and linguistic oppression.

Which is why IMLD matters. We still live in a world where linguistic prejudices are very strong, and often only marginally different from racism. We still live in a world where the freedom and the opportunity to speak one’s mother language without discrimination is denied, under-threat, and contested. We continue to live in a world where, for reasons ‘neutral’ but also many reasons that could be changed, minority languages are under threat and disappearing rapidly. The support and use of minority languages is, in my view, an issue of justice and fundamental human rights.

So I commend you to read the Background page on IMLD, and consider what part you might play in the support of linguistic diversity and preservation.

A few days ago this post appeared highlighting a new feature for Logos users, at least those on the subscription Logos Now model (which I am not).

As a big advocate of reader’s editions for students to move into more fluent and extended reading, I was pleased to see this step taken. A reader’s edition, well designed, rapidly aids a reader of an original-language text by providing helps (usually vocabulary glosses) for parts of the text that are odd, unusual, low frequency, etc., that would slow down comprehension to the point where the reader couldn’t understand and thus the benefits of attempting to read fluently are lost because the percentage of ‘unknowns’ becomes too high to process.

The post says, “Ideally, there would be multiple levels of reader’s editions”, tailored to individual learners’ levels. This would indeed be ideal, and digital texts with tagging and a reader’s edition feature would be an ideal solution for this. Printed volumes, or even static digital texts, have to guestimate the level of help a reader will need, and cannot adjust that level with any degree of ease.

Watching the video though, a number of limitations of what Logos is offering become apparent.

1) The texts available are only those for which an Interlinear exists. This is problematic because the number of those texts is really quite limited – Greek NT and LXX, Hebrew OT, and Greek Apostolic Fathers are the main ones; I am not sure if there are other interlinear texts on Logos because frankly I have no use for interlinears and wouldn’t recommend them as a tool for anybody, even in a digital format. This is a fairly considerable restriction of reader’s editions to a small corpus of texts.

Because it’s built on interlinears, it’s less useful. If it were built simply on morphologically tagged texts, that would (a) open up so many more texts that exist within the Logos datasphere, (b) in theory be infinitely expandable by user effort (even crowdsourced effort) to morphologically tag new texts.

2) The display is built upon the interlinear, so unlike the very fine reader’s editions published for the NT and OT, with footnoted vocab helps at the bottom, these digital reader’s editions suffer from the same problem that print interlinears do – they’re interlinears! They stick the gloss directly on a line underneath the main text. This is distracting and unhelpful. I would warrant a guess that anytime you see text in two or more languages, your eyes are usually drawn to the language you read more readily (your native language, if that’s an option) and away from the one you’re learning. I can’t see how this helps a learner to read more fluently and comprehend more directly.

The solution would require running the reading text with some kind of annotation in a side window or footer bar. I don’t know how Logos software is programmed or how their interlinears are encoded, so I don’t know how that would work.

3) The choice of words displayed/not displayed is based either on a pre-existing frequency list for the whole corpus (i.e., all the NT, not just the book you’re reading) or else a pre-existing word list. You can generate word lists, but this is not the fastest process. What is really lacking is a ‘personalised, dynamic word list’, to which you could add and subtract words ‘on the fly’, representing your own personal, internalised lexicon. That is the level of individual tailoring that is needed.

4) Vocab helps, but not grammar helps. In my view, unfamiliar or difficult grammar can also be tackled in a good reader’s edition, which is one more feature lacking here. Much more difficult to implement and to scale to individual readers, but a desideratum nonetheless.

Is it a good idea? Yes. But it will need some development I suspect.

2)

Hi, I’m Seumas and I’m a chronic codeswitcher.

Code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages or language varieties in a single discourse event. It’s not a bad thing necessarily, indeed when I was in Mongolia and speaking with competent bilinguals, codeswitching made a lot of sense – there were just words and expressions that were better of not being translated to enforce monolingualism in a single conversation.

But it is a problem when it comes to academic writing. My thesis work involves a far bit of working with Greek and Latin, and I work on the assumption that anyone dealing with my writing in these fields (certainly my examiners) ought to have at least the competency in these two languages that I do. It is thus fairly natural to code-switch a lot of Latin phrases, and Greek ones, into my English writing.

Personally, this goes beyond a string of Latin idioms, id est, ad hoc, ipssissima verba, καὶ τὰ λοιπά. I find myself prone to wanting to start a sentence in English and finish it with a whole clause in Latin.

Generally I resist, or edit out, such tendencies. Because a written document has less control over its readership and less possibilities of ‘clarification’ than an oral conversation. Almost everything I want to say can be said in English, if I make the effort to phrase it in English. Restricting my writing to a single language broadens my theoretical audience and generates a less cumbersome text. And certainly one ought to avoid those monstrous texts of the polyglot codeswitch addicts, who begin in English, wander into allusions and citations of Greek and Latin verse, and then add commentary in French and German. Assuming an audience of pentalingual readers does not a work for posterity make.

So I’m doing my best to keep my ὁ Χριστὸς κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρωπινόν and qui secundum hominem secondum Deum in duobus naturis una res est to a minimum. If you knew the struggle, you’d thank me for it.

Perhaps not the most common myths about Christmas, but these are the ones I regularly have to interact with online.

1. Christmas is a Christianisation of celebrations for Sol Invictus

Given that the first indisputable *dating* for Christmas to Dec 25th is the same document (the Chronicon of 354) that first attests to a birthday for Invictus, possibly Sol Invictus, it’s impossible to assert that Christmas is derivative of Sol Invictus’ birthday, any more certainly than the opposite.

2. Christmas involved a deliberate strategy of taking over Pagan holidays

Patristic authors never talk about such a strategy, pagan opponents never accuse such a strategy, and Christian theologians generally spend their time telling believers to stay well away from pagan holidays. The earliest argument for this view is not until the 17th and early 18th century, with proponents like Paul Ernst Jablonski and Jean Hardouin. The earliest suggestion of deliberate ‘takeover’ or ‘replacement’ of pagan holidays is Gregory the Great commissioning Augustine in the mission to the Angles. Apart from this there is a 12th century Syrian suggestion from Dionysius bar-Salibi that it was shifted from Jan 6th to Dec 25th to replace Sol Invictus, but I think we can consider the 12th century far enough removed that this may not reflect what actually happened in the 4th century.

3. Christmas is just a take-off of Mithras.

Justin Martyr is the first to make a connection between Mithras and Christianity, and he’s accusing Mithras followers of copying Christian elements. Given that the Mithras cult appears to be a mystery-type cult, involves only the broadest typological parallels to Christianity, and was restricted to initiated males, it’s unlikely that Christmas took off from Mithras. Add to that, it’s not even clear that Mithras should be identified with Sol Invictus either.

4. Christmas is Saturnalia

Given point 2 above, Christians had no known interest in rehabilitating Saturnalia. Saturnalia also ended *before* Christmas, so if they wanted to co-opt it they should have moved Christmas earlier.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas…

Patristic Readers

At the start of November I published the first volume, the Martyrdoms of Polycarp and Perpetua (Available now at createspace, and Amazon). This month I’ve been doing three things: I’ve just finished proofing the third Gregory text, and started compiling the vocabulary. I also finished up the vocabulary file on the first Latin project. Thirdly, I’ve had some chats about going to a more digital format, and been doing some experimenting in the last few days at http://www.perseids.org with morphology tagging a digital text and then doing syntactic tree-banking. The first part is okay but I’m still figuring out the second part.

Thesis

Doing the church retreat and the trip to Atlanta made a bit of a dent in dedicated thesis time. Nonetheless I am still making forward progress. At present I’m doing some revision work on chapters one and two and trying to bring them into a decent shape. I’m also working through my footnotes and conforming them all to a single style. I hope to turn back to some more substantive work in the next few weeks.

SBL

Well, I don’t have anything to say about SBL that I didn’t say in my previous post.

Summary

All in all, going well, not too many projects on the boil now and really going to be trying to bring my dissertation to fruition with the majority of my efforts now.

This Thursday I’m off to SBL Annual in Atlanta. I’ll be presenting in the Development of Early Christian Theology section on
the Saturday at 4pm. Feel free to come along if you like hearing about exegesis in Basil.

It’s been 13 years since I last visited the States. Who knows when I might be back. If you’re going to be at SBL and would like to catch up, leave me a comment or message.

I see that I haven’t written one of these for awhile. Not too much to report just at present.

PhD

Is going along well, though it could be going moreso. July was a productive month, and the start of August was not bad either, though things became more focused on writing the paper for Oxford Patristics. That was a helpful experience (writing the paper), as it also crystallised a few things not just about content but about approach and methodology that will be useful going on.

Patristic Readers

Sorry, nothing to report here. My ability to allot time here has been undercut by other concerns. This very day though I will finish up a small piece of administration that hopefully will move the print volume forward in its timeline.

Looking ahead

I’m off to Mongolia for another 2 weeks, which at this stage is quite a chunk of time. I’ve laid out my best plans to resume activities quickly on my return, including a timeline for completing draft chapters, as well as a small amount of dedicated time for Patristic Readers.

The other day I was riding the bus to university and happened to be on the same bus as a fellow member of my church. They were expressing a typical sentiment about full-time research students: that they ought to be ‘incredibly disciplined’ since there are very few external constraitns on their time. This is, or ought to be, mostly true.

For myself, I aim to spend a full 5 days at my desk, minus an afternoon on which I do some Greek teaching. I get to the office 7:30 (if I drive) or 8:00 if I catch a bus, and leave between 5 and 6pm.

Generally speaking there are six things that fill each day. The first is primary, directly-related to writing the dissertation work. This includes sub-sections like reading secondary literature, working on my primary documents, and working on other ancient documents that are secondary to my thesis. Because this is the real work that is driving the thesis forward, I try and schedule blocks that total up to 4 hours a day for this work. Secondly, each day I spent a little bit of time (45mins usually) on some language work. Since I’m in an Australian context, I have no language exams, but I am supposed to be able to read and utilise secondary literature in relevant languages. For me that means German, French, and Italian. So most days I do a little bit of work on duolingo, and I am working faithfully through “German Quickly: A grammar for Reading German” by April Wilson, and “French for Reading” by Karl Sandberg. A third thing I do each week is spend some time more broadly on Greek and Latin, the two essential languages for my research. So I have about 4-6 hours spread across the week where I work on other texts, classical and patristic, that bear sometimes more sometimes less direct relationship to my field. Fourthly, I allot 30mins for lunch each day. Fifthly, I have about 3 skype calls each week, which involve some language tutoring that I do. They run for about 40 mins each. Sixthly, I do at least an hour’s worth of exercise each day, usually over at the university gym.

Once I slot in all those things, and the occasional trip to the library or the local shopping complex for various errands, and most of my day fills up with things to do. Let’s take a few example days:

Today (Friday): I got to the office at 7:30. Overnight I had posted a reddit comment about relationship of early Christianity and Judaism that received a lot of attention and comments, so I spent 25 minutes responding to comments from the previous evening. Then at 8 I settled into some language work, which meant about 45 mins of French/German/Italian. About 9 I switched to working directly on thesis work, which today meant re-reading portions of Basil’s Against Eunomius, writing commentary on it, and producing material that (eventually) will form a significant chapter. At 10:30 I took a short break from that to work on Augustine’s Confessions in Latin. Normally I have a skype call at 11, but today the other party cancelled so I had some time open up in my day. From 12 I had lunch, and then I returned to thesis work, this time reading some recent secondary sources that my thesis interacts with.

Normally I would go through until later in the afternoon, but today I went to the gym at 2pm, which wasn’t the best timing it turned out. At 3 I came back to the office and did some more reading and tidying up of a few loose ends, before heading home via the supermarket about 4. I then spent a couple of hours in the evening reading more on the Greek perfect and working on the Greek of Ad Ablabium.

So yes, grad student life for me is mainly about self-discipline and a lot of reading. So much reading. Always reading.

Welcome to The Patrologist.

Why a new blog? Why this one? What’s different? Why now?

I have been blogging now for many years, in various places. Lately I have been blogging very consistently and with some modicum of engagement on the interrelated topics of Greek, Latin, Classical language instruction, Biblical Studies, and Patristics. Meanwhile, in my own life, I am about to transition again from a full-time teaching position to full-time studies. Recently I also launched off an enterprise in Patristic Readers. All of which is accumulating and culminating to the launch of this site and this new web presence.

The Patrologist is going to be a new home for my thoughts on this diverse matters, as well as a site that will both host materials related to Latin and Greek studies, provide opportunities for on-line and in-person tutoring, and generally push for excellence in the study of Classics, Biblical studies, and Patristics.

The static pages here provide links and information about a number of these interrelated projects.

The blog will provide regular content on these various themes. It will take over from Subversive Compliance as my main blog for these kinds of matters. I will also be revisiting some of the posts I had previously posted there, hopefully with some fresh attention and thought.

Welcome, enjoy, stay for the ride. The first genuinely new content post will be up tomorrow!