State of the Projects #3
Well, I had hoped to keep things rolling along monthly with this newsletter, but the start of April turned into a case of "okay, what needs to be done today and what can be put off until tomorrow", every day for the last fortnight.
Teaching
We're now just past week 7 out of 12 for my two colleges, and they're both on a two week break. It's been rather exhausting. And the major marking portion of semester is still ahead. I've also finished up my first 10-week term of online small group classes. That was also challenging and rewarding. I find teaching a lot of back to back hours, and actually having time to prep, even if only mentally, quite a lot. I suppose that's no surprise.
Term 2 starts up this week or next, depending. I have just 3 classes running, which actually is what I had last term. But, excitingly, one of those will be using LGPSI as its "text".
I've begun to think more seriously about how I might put together a static, video-based course to cover Koine Greek 101 and 102, that could be worked through by students independently and asynchronously, and serve as a stand alone product. I feel like LGPSI would form a good basis for that, and it's something I'm looking to develop perhaps in 2020.
LGPSI
The real advantage of using LGPSI for one of my college classes, is that it has compelled production. I'm just about finished writing chapter 7. Every week and chapter brings new challenges, not least that writing an interesting, compelling, comprehensible, suitably graded, idiomatically accurate, grammatically correct Greek text is a stretch.
I'm very pleased to see that my friend Eric has started working on some subsidia or supplementa, see here: http://ericsowell.com/blog/2019/4/14/the-companion It really matches very nicely with what I'm doing, and expresses my idea of a 'shared fictional universe' well, even if chapter one is just geography!
Conference
The other week I presented at a local conference of theological educators, essentially outlining how I had implemented Tauber's ideas about sequencing NT passages based on 'next minimum step' vocabulary. I took a sequence or pericopes as the basis for a whole 2nd semester Greek course. My students worked with me, well through asynchronous videos, through a rather large amount of NT passages, primarily from John, dealing with grammar as it arose rather than as a textbook dictated. This same principle, or idea, btw, became one impetus for our Apostolic Fathers work too.
Anyway, my paper attempts to put this on a SLA research foundation, as well as showcase how it worked on its first instance, how it's influenced my current approach to first-semester NT Greek, and how this might continue to develop.
It was attended by only a few people, but they were very keen about what I was doing, as well as hearing a little more about Tauber and my grand schemes for better Greek pedagogy.
You can access slides and audio from my talk here: https://thepatrologist.com/2019/04/08/re-sequencing-vocabulary-for-nt-greek-learners/
Personal Language Learning:
I've still been logging hours, though I have no great insights to add from recent times. I finished reading Pugio Bruti by Daniel Pettersson, which is a very fine example of a modern CI-based novella. My LLPSI read through has slowed down, but should revive shortly. In Greek, I've been spending time in Xenophon, but also finished up reading and conversing (in Greek) about Plato's Critias, and we've started on Ion. It's almost the end of the academic year for my Gaelic studies, and with a long (17 week!) break before school starts again, I've realised that my real need there is considerably more exposure to aural Gaelic input.
Blogs and Podcasts:
Here's some posts from the last month, if you missed them:
Same conversation same text: https://thepatrologist.com/2019/03/06/same-conversation-same-text-a-technique/
A communicative curriculum to cover Mounce? https://thepatrologist.com/2019/03/21/could-one-write-a-communicative-curriculum-to-cover-mounce/
Teaching the perfect by not teaching it: https://thepatrologist.com/2019/03/27/maybe-the-key-to-teaching-the-perfect-is-not-to-teach-it/
But didn't you do grammar-translation? https://thepatrologist.com/2019/04/04/but-didnt-you-do-grammar-translation/
How G-T might lead to acquisition: https://thepatrologist.com/2019/04/11/how-grammar-translation-might-lead-to-acquisition/
ὁ διὰ νυκτὸς διάλογος.
https://odianuktosdialogos.podomatic.com
Projects in various states of disrepair:
- Digital Nyssa: zero progress
- Translation of treatise on hysteria: draft edition waiting revising
- LGPSI - 6.66 chapters completed
Well, that's a wrap, I think. A lot of activity but perhaps not a lot of progress.
Seumas