The Real First Day, RBoC

Classes start a week from tomorrow. But as of today, summer is officially over.

Today begins our 2-day faculty retreat. Then, the rest of the week is new-student orientation. Then, a relatively joyless Labor Day weekend filled with the last-minute labors of course preparation. Then finally, "Good morning, eager young minds."

Here are my start-of-term Random Bullets of Crap:

• Try to chill out and enjoy faculty retreat for two days;
• Prepare for student orientation session on online coursework and our Bible Content course;
• Get advisees safely settled into their sockets for the term;
• Finish planning, syllabus, and LMS build for online course Intro to Old Testament;
• Complete last set of Flickr slides for face-to-face course Elementary Biblical Hebrew;
• Make progress in home stretch of online course in online pedagogy;
• Make long-postponed repairs to my suits: buttons, hems;
• Office housekeeping: get plant out of water pitcher into planter, and swap out cafeteria plastic tableware for a couple of sets of proper, if cheap, table settings.

Where are you in the start of the term? What are your own random bullets?

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[The Real First Day, RBoC was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/27. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

RBoC: Not-Yet-End-of-Term Edition

End of term? Not even Spring Break yet! (Next week, insh'allah and the creek don't rise).

I have in mind some writing on pseudonymity and nymity in blogging, on a recent Chronicle op piece about keeping quiet in faculty meetings, on ancient language “reading examinations,” and on “feeling like a writer.” This is what I’m doing instead:

• Facilitating faculty training on our new Moodle learning management system (so long, Blackboard);


• Arranging to offer similar training to our platoon of TAs;


• Preparing biblical Greek reading exams for 2nd-year Greek students and Ph.D. candidates;


• Catching up on a self-paced UWM online certification program in online teaching and learning;


• Working up a couple of videos for our seminary admissions page;


• Keeping up on quizzes, exams, and papers for Elementary Hebrew, Elementary Greek, and Intro to OT;


• Experimenting with a couple of new productivity helps to organize the above and more;


• Eat, sleep, you know. Maybe try for a haircut.

What do you find this week  among your RBoC?

[RBoC: Not-Yet-End-of-Term Edition was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/04/12. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Random Bullets of Research

It’s piled noticeably higher and deeper around here. Currently in the hopper are:

• Deciding on bibliography for a course on “The Old Testament in the New Testament (Allusion and Influence)”;


• Learning our institutional options and guidelines regarding creating course-packs, for above;


• Bringing my dissertation’s bibliography (late 2007) up to date, for revision;


• Inquiry into what “community” is, how we recognize it in a group of learners, and where it is found in the first sixteen years or so of internet-based online education (presentation for SBL 2010).


• Bread in the Bible and the ANE, baby.

Fortunately, I took the precaution of earning a research degree. Otherwise, I’d be worried.

[Random Bullets of Research was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/06. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

SBLogging: Sunday Morning RBoC

• At some point, I am going to have to eat a dinner that I can afford. Not here in NOLA, of course, but at some point.


• Had the great pleasure of meeting Julia O’Brian yesterday.


• The sessions “Warfare in Ancient Israel” and “Disability Studies and Healthcare in the Bible and Near East” sections held a joint session yesterday: very cool. Nice paper by Bryan Bibb about (in part) how, just as prophetic texts will seek to demean their male audience by casting them as women, they will demean their able-bodied audience by casting them as disabled (sometimes by describing their enemies as preternaturally able-bodied).


• Giving my own paper today, in the Distance Learning session.


• Finding great value in the Twittering on SBL: keep it up, everyone.

RBoC: "Endless October" Edition

The calendar has turned, and the weather gone from  “all rain all the time” to “all chilly rain all the time,” but plus ça change, plus c'est toujours l'October.


On my plate:

• apply for work (’tis the season)


• prepare SBL presentation


• write overdue report for distance-learning committee


• hey, I preach next week


• grade midterms for Intro to OT


• grade midterms for Hebrew


• write midterm feedback for Intro to OT blogging


• get caught up podcasting lectures for Intro to OT


• oversee peer review of midterm papers in Intro to OT

Plus the usual stuff in the personal sphere, including but not limited to:

• keep the Boy involved in Cub Scout achievements


• help the Boy prepare for his next Taekwon-do promotion test

The next time I look up, I’ll be on a plane for New Orleans. Then I’ll blink, and be grading final exams. Should I just start humming Advent tunes now?

RBoC: T-Minus 21 Hours Edition

This time tomorrow, I will have finished with my first Hebrew session of the year, and be worshiping in chapel under the handicap of anticipating our first session of the large introductory Old Testament course.

On my mind today are the following:

• It’s my wife’s birthday. Why do academics marry people with early September birthdays? Sometimes we just can’t help ourselves, and besides, I wasn’t an academic when we married, or when she was born, for that matter.


• The Blackboard Help Desk never returns calls. [Later: that was pretty snarky. In fact, once they realized that our classes have started NOW, they have been very much on the case.]


• I want to post on the “women in biblioblogging” kerfluffle about as badly as I don’t want to post on it. (No link: either you’re up on it or you don’t need to know.) Preliminary observations: 1) Among the non-Bible academic blogs, women appear to me to constitute a pretty solid majority (for a self-selected and anecdotal glimpse, see my second blogroll). 2) With others, I point out that the soi-disant “bibliobloggers” are a skewed sample of Bible scholars: aside from being mostly male, they are mostly grad students, and (I am not dying to try to defend this or even define it too closely) largely somewhat conservative in background or readership. 3) Biblical studies as a culture tends to lag at least a few decades behind its ancillary disciplines (literary criticism, archaeology, history, culture studies, you name it, and yes-it’s-true-that-other-fields-can-be-slow-to-hear-what-we’re-doing-too). 4) Jobs are hard enough to find and keep, and more so for women than for men, and so far “bibliobogging” isn’t exactly up there in the requirements for tenure. I don’t wish at this time to try to tie these points together into a coherent set of claims, except perhaps to say, “It’s pretty early in the day yet, folks, yet not too early for attention to collegiality and justice.” More to follow, maybe.


• Pre-recording slide-enhanced podcast lectures takes, on average, four times longer than simply delivering the lecture in class. And that’s just for beta-version, not-ready-for-prime-time product.


• Fall ball? Why did we think that we had time for our son to be involved in fall baseball?


• I have a presentation to prepare for the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (weekend before Thanksgiving, New Orleans LA).


• I cannot wait to get back into some more substantial posts. Be patient, please, neighbors.