Hardly the Last Word

400 posts! Woo hoo! Also, I’ve now translated 319 lines of Beowulf, or 10% of the thing! Hwaet!

We’re two days into the Psalms unit now, and classes are picking up fast. I don’t know whether I’ve just packed the first two papers too closely towards the semester’s beginning or whether my own classes are hindering my ability to expend energy on my teaching, but paper two’s revision meetings start next Friday, and [...]

Okay, you know that last post in which I said my students were overly compliant? Forget it. On the class’s online discussion board, the pro-Joseph brigade has made a charge. Let the games begin!

I spent a fair bit of time in my classes on Friday laying out my theories about agency and grammar and why excessive passive and expletive constructions hinder good academic writing, so we had too little time, as usual, to talk about Joseph. This group of students, I think, tends too far towards malleability (or [...]

I found a small, 128MB mp3 player at Toys R Us for fifteen bucks. Since I only use such devices when I run, and since an hour and twenty minutes’ music covers more time than my out-of-shape legs can, it’s a great purchase. In Hebrew Bible teaching news, the first day of Joseph went entirely [...]

Well, two playoff games and zero touchdowns given up… And half a dozen (I think) Manning interceptions with one touchdown thrown. I suppose the playoff season is a strange place to live. Lord help our Colts!

Drop/Add period ended at midnight last night, and the semester proper is under way. We did get-to-know-each-other stuff today, mainly so we could get into the texts with a little less tension in the air. Monday we begin Joseph, and I’ve already forgotten my Harper-Collins Study Bible in my office for the first time this [...]

All of my spring classes have now met, and the semester’s going to be a rough one. I’m already feeling tired thinking of all the hours I’m going to spend reading Hegel and translating Beowulf. But when I make it through, I’ll nearly be a Jedi. My Hebrew Bible and/as Literature classes have met twice, [...]

First, I’d like to thank the folks who commented on my first, haphazard post-Christmas post for reading and thinking with me. The following (still haphazard) reflections will attempt to respond to some of those comments. When I talk about a group’s appropriating a common symbol and making it a shibboleth for one faction, I don’t [...]

Christmas Trip 2006 I’m not sure how this particular Picasa widget works, but I suppose clicking on it might yield pictures.

If ever anyone actually fought a War on Christmas, I think they won this year. For the first time in my 29 years, I started feeling uneasy when people wished me a Merry Christmas. The greeting, friendly or at worst benign throughout my years, started in 2006 to sound like a Republican code word. I [...]

11 days, 2200 miles, four family get-togethers, one stomach virus, and a case of strep later, and we’re back! Christmas pictures will be coming soon, but since Micah’s contagious for one more day (he’s doing quite well on an antibiotic and never, as far as I can tell, realized that he was sick), I’m not [...]