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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
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This is a difficult one to write about, because as I initially added in my tweets, “The causality of that is complex though, and not easily generalised.” But it remains true, that some who start off as Evangelicals end up ex-Evangelicals. Firstly, correlation isn’t causation, and in the
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This is the first part of however many parts. The book I’m talking about today is Ossa Latinitatis Sola: ad mentem Reginaldi rationemque (The mere bones of Latin: according to the thought and system of Reginald), by Reginaldus Thomas Foster, and Daniel Patricius McCarthy. If you’ve never heard
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In many ways, this reason is related to reasons three and four, and so I have correspondingly less to say about it. Evangelicals involved in academic pursuits, theology in particular, tend to clump their interests around biblical studies, systemics, and practical areas of ministry training. And the first two among
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I don’t like to be the kind of person who starts every conversation with, “Well, when I was in Mongolia….” It gets tired, fast, and it’s not like I’m an expert or have any special insights or anything. Nonetheless, it’s an important and formative factor of