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I'm not really a classicist, I don't pretend to be. Patristics isn't Classics anyway, and my route to where I am was very, hmm, "liberal arts". Across my studies I accumulated majors, or their equivalents, in Philosophy, Creative Writing, Latin, and Theology.
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[Disclaimer: I was given a complimentary license key to this program in conjunction with doing this review] I think it’s a brave person who asks me for a product review. Especially if you know the general tenor of my reviews, and general views on pedagogy. So, I had to
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Within the orbit of evangelical mission activity, teaching English overseas seems like an easy and perfect fit. People 'overseas' want to learn English. You already know English. They often prize a native-speaker over accreditation or experience. And English provides a vehicle to the Bible and to the
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I semi-regularly hear the term “rigour” applied to teaching programs, and worse, language programs, as if it were a kind of virtue. It might be, but what is usually meant by “rigour” is not virtuous at all, it just sounds like it. What is “rigour” anyway, and why would
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(And we’re back. Being sick threw my blogging schedule out the window.) What’s the point of marking essays? So often in humanities we make essay-writing the examinable element of a course, and the more I both read up on this, and reflect on this, the more problematic
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Recently I’ve been trying to figure out some guidelines for setting readings for university courses. There seem to be a number of complicating factors: * Do students read? * How much time can you expect students to read each week? * How fast can students read? * How dense is the reading material?
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I’ve been spending more time with Zuntz’s textbooks, and I thought I would write some follow up thoughts (subsequent to this earlier post) Firstly, over on this post from 2016 in Textkit (a surprisingly active forum, given how terrible its interface is. In fact, most forums should have
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I’ve thought a lot about marking, and I have never come up with any good answers. What exactly are we marking for? The topic that got me thinking on this recently was a question about learning relatively rare irregular noun paradigms in Greek. Language instructors, I feel, have a
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In lieu of the many other posts I have floating around my brain and yet to make it to the digital page, I offer some reflections on the week just gone. This week, and now for the 6th time in a row, as a tutor at least, I was teaching
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The Italian version of Athenaze, which first appeared all the way back in 1999, has long remained something of a mythical creature for a lot of English language students. Athenaze, of course, is the venerable Oxford produced Classical Greek course first produced in 1995 and now into its third edition.
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Recently an acquaintance of mine blogged this post, What is the Benefit of Greek & Hebrew?, in which he says, “[r]eading in Greek and Hebrew slows me down and helps me rummage around in the text and reflect.” And goes on to reflect on this. I think this is
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All textbooks have flaws, and this one does too. When I studied Koine Greek in a seminary context, the 2nd year course was given over to working our way rigourously through Wallace’s Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, a scary book. In recent times two texts have appeared attempting to