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1. My second year as Teaching Fellow involved two new preps -- Hebrew and Intermediate Greek. At first, I was a little annoyed at Bill Patrick for finageling a second two year term as Teaching Fellow. That meant he would teach the summer Greek intensive, which was money I wanted. But it seems like perhaps I was allowed to teach Hebrew then, which was perfectly delightful for me. Not all TFs got to teach Hebrew.
Lawson Stone had sung the praises of LaSor (although apparently not enough to use it). I loved it. It was my first experiment with teaching biblical languages inductively. It wouldn't be the last.
Teaching a biblical language inductively can require some pastoral skills. With LaSor especially, students had a good deal of miscellaneous information rattling around in their heads before they could see the big picture. And that is highly uncomfortable -- especially the more "J" you are.
Then, all of a sudden, everything comes together. And in a shorter time period than it would have taken otherwise.
But I loved it. It was great for me, having first learned Hebrew from Seow's textbook, to solidify my understanding with LaSor. Maybe a smidge selfish. But to this day, my sense of Hebrew phonetics is far better than it would be otherwise.
I had some really good students. I like to boast that I was Brian Russell's Hebrew teacher. Of course, I couldn't answer half his questions. So let's just say he taught himself.
Jeff Finger stands out to me as a student, not so much because of his Hebrew prowess, although I'm sure he got an A. Rather, he was a quite unique fellow. I remember one class where he was laying on top of his desk on his back holding LaSor up in the air. This is a desk chair I'm talking about.
2. He seemed like just the right person to play "Lust Boy" for Ichthus that summer of 1991. Denise Greenhalgh, as I recall, had asked me to be Ichthusman for the Christian rock festival. Bob Lyon had started the festival way back in the 70s, as I recall, as a Christian alternative to Woodstock. (I would later propose to Angie during the festival in 1998. This was before they moved it to the place where it died.)
As a small taste of what I had become, I made the suggestion in all seriousness of parachuting into the festival. After checking, the response was that the insurance company would drop us like a hot potato if we tried such a stunt.
So I invented the costume myself. Yellow cleaning gloves. Someone sowed a yellow fish (ichthus) on a black turtleneck I got at a Goodwill type store. Black pants. Purple cape. Some (cheap) cool 90s sunglasses. I had some used clothes that we cut up and vecroed so that I could rip them off to the tune of "This looks like a job for Ichthusmannnnnn!" The costume was underneath.
So that summer we vanquished Lust Boy. I think Scott Brown might have been "Sin Man" the next summer.
3. I also taught Intermediate Greek using Brooks and Winbery as a grammar and Metzger's Lexical Aids. Students were supposed to go through Galatians and both do sentence diagrams and give a semantic analysis for each word.
No doubt, I was not the best teacher for this. That was I believe when I met Jim McNeely. I seem to recall that Bryan Blankenship was in that class as well, but I could be wrong. As usual, I learned a great deal while teaching.
The year after I was teaching fellow, I would take two semesters at UK in Sanskrit. It was a linguistics sequence. I wish I could say I gave it the time it deserved. I mention it because Sanskrit has an 8 case noun system, and Brooks and Winbery analyzed the five Greek cases using that Indo-European model. [1]
The Nominative, Accusative, and Vocative have always stood alone. But the genitive was originally a genitive and ablative. And the dative was originally dative, locative, and instrumental cases. Indeed, this is a curious thing to me. While we are used to thinking of things getting more developed over time, the Indo-European languages have actually become much simpler over time. Modern Greek is simpler than ancient Greek, and ancient Greek was simpler than its Indo-European ancestor.
I have always felt like I was just a step behind. If I knew everything that I have studied, I would be quite a knowledgable fellow.
4. McNeely likes to remind me that I was fined for trespassing on railroad property with a girl I was dating from Asbury College at the time. But I'll let that story pass.
[1] I suppose this is a good place to mention that I sat in on Dr. Stone's Akkadian class too my first year as Teaching Fellow. I didn't find the time to learn it as well as I wished. It was quite a fun deviation, since it used cuneiform for its syllables. He needed my warm body for the class to go, as I recall.
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