State of the Projects #2
Well, here we are with the second newsletter! Welcome to you if you've just subscribed, make sure to have a look at the archive, vol 1 is worth reading!
Teaching
This week has marked the start of the academic semester, and year, here in Aus. For me, that means classes started at two institutions. Which has significantly increased my workload.
Not least, I'm teaching Intro to NT Greek 1 in a totally online environment, and that means writing my own materials. I suppose, as I tweeted, that other people might just set a textbook, but my dissatisfaction with textbooks is reasonably well known. Instead, my students get my own grammar notes, but more importantly, and time consuming, they are getting a draft version of Lingua Graeca per se Illustrata. This is forcing me to keep composing, and then there are video lectures to record on top of that.
My first term of online group classes has just wrapped up week 7 out of 10, and personally I'm quite pleased with how they've gone (so far). It's been rewarding to be spending these extra 3 hours a week teaching primarily in Latin and Greek, and I learn a lot too (mainly by showing gaps in my own active production.
LLGPSI
I'm pleased to say that 25 people signed up to my not-actually-a-newsletter to find out more about LLGPSI as it progresses. I'm excited by the interest shown in this, and the positive stimulus loop it's generating!
Backburner
The reality of doing a lot of adjuncting is that I end up with quite a bit of marking, which I do not really love. I have reservations about the usefulness of many of our assessment modes, and it consumes a lot of time. Needless to say, this last few weeks I have been marking final essays from our summer semester here, which has ground almost all other tasks to a halt....
Language Logging
I made a post or two about both the importance of counting hours, not years, in language learning, and then about logging my own hours in the coming year. Although, as I've said, not all hours are created equal. Anyway, I'm very pleased to say that February's hours are 45 Latin, 24 Greek, 8 Gaelic. Well, that's still rather low for Gaelic, but the other two are looking healthy. Much of it is driven by teaching though.
Comprehensible Online
One of my sometimes laments is that I was never trained as a teacher. Sure, one picks up things along the way, but particularly as regards how languages are learnt, and how they should be taught, I read a lot of theory, and picked up a lot along the way. There's still a lot, practically, that I'm figuring out.
To help that, this month I'm doing an 'online conference' where all the presentations are video recordings and available online. It's been incredibly interesting so far, and I'm picking up lots of ideas for more communicative teaching methods, so that's excellent.
I think that's a wrap for now. If you're in my LGPSI list, stay tuned for some more details there. And in my next email I'm going to talk a little about how you could financially back some of my projects, which is my least favourite topic to write about.
Usque ad proximum, valete,
Seumas