Teaching Fellow - Hebrew 2

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6. It was during those two years that I was Ichthusman. Ichthus was a Christian rock festival that Bob Lyon started in the early seventies as a sort of Christian version of Woodstock. Youth groups would come from all over and camp in tents at the Wilmore campground. The latest contemporary Christian bands would come.

For fun, Ichthusman would fight Lust Boy or Sin Man. I think Scott Brown was Sin Man one year and Jeff Finger Lust Boy the next. This is not something anyone would have asked me to do as a shy student but it fit with my new persona as a funny and unorthodox Greek teacher. I bought some old clothes at Goodwill and velcroed them so I could rip them off, leaving me standing in my underlying cape and tights.

At one point I had the idea of parachuting onto the stage. We seriously considered it until we found out that our insurance wouldn't cover such a stunt. I've only parachuted once in my life. It was my first summer in England. Rachel Leonard wanted to do it and I said I'd do it with her.

It looks so simple from the ground, but up in the air I wondered why I would agree to do such a thing. I do heights but will admit to some nervousness when I get up somewhere. It was a static line jump, meaning that a line pulled your shoot for you when you jumped. It was a propeller plane so we had to climb out on the wing and let go backward. Quite a thing.

I made myself do it. The first ten feet of falling were gone in an instant leaving a really nice float the rest of the way down. I waited for Rachel to jump. The engines went off. No Rachel. The engines came back on. It circled around. The engines went off. Finally Rachel. I guess the only reason she let go was because the guy yelled and startled her.

7. My second year I got to teach Hebrew. I think most of us would learn best by teaching someone else. I had taken a fair amount of Greek by the time I began teaching, but there were still a lot of rough edges. After teaching Greek for a year, I was pretty good at it.

I was not as strong at Hebrew. I selfishly chose LaSor as a Hebrew textbook. Lawson Stone had sung its praises once upon a time. LaSor introduced Hebrew inductively. A Fuller professor, he started with Esther 1:1 to learn the letters and by the end of the book you knew Hebrew. He paid high attention to the phonology and morphology of Hebrew, with an iconic list of rules in the back (a dagesh forte is omitted if a vocal shewa appears beneath it).

With LaSor, I believe, students learned Hebrew more quickly and more thoroughly than with a classical approach. Moreover, they learned it where they could use it even after one semester. The problem is that your head swims for the first month or so. You are seeing everything in the language from the very beginning.

The hyper-J personality is prone to panic. Frankly, I don't know if I would have enjoyed learning Hebrew that way but it was much more fun to teach. The J wants to learn a small bit, master it, then go on to the next bit. This is really not the way language works. As children, we are thrown into the whole language.

To learn a foreign language, one ultimately needs to go somewhere where that is all that is being spoken around you. This was the rule when I first went to Germany in spring 95. They were not allowed to speak English to me until I had a complete fail.

Teaching Hebrew with LaSor thus requires a bit of pastoral care. I was good at that. You have to assure people that it's going to be ok. You have to get them to trust the method. And, sure enough, it suddenly all begins to click a month or two into the course. Then you're reading real Hebrew. You're seeing the same things over and over again.

I'm proud to say that I taught Brian Russell Hebrew. He has since gone on to be and Old Testament scholar and Dean of the Orlando campus of Asbury. He was of course much more gifted at Hebrew than I was. He would constantly ask questions whose answers I didn't know.

I have always had a penchant for teaching things inductively. This was part of the initial genius of Wesley Seminary--problem based learning that induces principles from realia. There is a certain personality that hates this. It wants to learn systematically in building blocks. Most of academia is this way.

I have to view this approach, however, as somewhat artificial, even if it is helpful for some very intelligent people. It is not the way of the real world. It is a quasi-Platonic approach to life that is not actually the way the world works. I call it the Platonic fallacy. Perhaps I will return to this question.

8. Joe Dongell is a brilliant professor at Asbury. He came I think my last year as a student. He is the son of Herb Dongell, whom I had for Greek at Central. His younger brother Pete is another good friend who came to Asbury a little after me. After Fred Long, Pete also became a Teaching Fellow.

It wasn't really intentional, but my life path mimicked Joe's to some extent. Of course he had surpassed me at every step. He went to Central as I would. Then he went to Asbury as I would. He was a Teaching Fellow as I became.

While he was a Teaching Fellow, he decided to do a MA in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Kentucky. He told me once he wanted to see if he could do well in a secular environment as well as in a Christian one. He received a full scholarship to do his master's there.

It seemed like a good idea to me. I get antsy if I do the same thing over and over again anyway and I need to be learning something new all the time. So I applied for the same scholarship he had received and was accepted to work on an MA in classics at UK.

I jumped into Greek Tragedy, perhaps as early as the spring of my first year teaching. That was an eye opener. For one thing, it's poetry. The normal rules of language are typically bent in poetry. I had learned a little about meter back in high school, but now I was analyzing iambic pentameter in Greek. Hubert Martin was the professor, the nicest of people. He helped me limp through the course.

I would soon learn that some of the rules I thought were universal were not. I probably was a more effective teacher for not knowing the nuances. I learned that ἵνα didn't always take a subjunctive and that οὐ could actually be used with participles. I got a glimpse of the disdain some classicists have for "that merchant Greek" of the New Testament (none of my professors at UK said that).

Before the discovery of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, the Greek of the New Testament was a bit of an enigma. Some suggested it might be "Holy Ghost" Greek. But when this cache of ordinary documents were discovered in Egypt in the late 1800s, it was realized that the New Testament is actually written in "street Greek," ordinary, common, "Koine" Greek.

This fact throws a bit of a wrench into the argument that we should read the Bible in the King James because of its lofty language. Apparently God didn't think so.