Tag: Pedagogy

Daily Gleanings: Life in Biblical Scholarship (25 July 2019)

Brett McKay and Mithu Storoni discuss how to improve resilience to stress, something that biblical scholars too can often benefit from a good bit greater competence in.

In Didaktikos’s July issue, Kenneth Berding discusses the “benefits and challenges of living in community with students” (9–10). The Berdings now have a larger property near Biola where they rent out several of the living spaces to university students. But Kenneth comments, in part,

Community living is simply about participating in everyday life with students; you don’t have to be their next-door neighbor. (10)

For more, see Kenneth’s full essay in Didaktikos.

Babyak, “Teaching strategy for a Christian virtual environment”

I’ve recently had the opportunity of working through Andrew Babyak’s article, “A Teaching Strategy for a Christian Virtual Environment” (Journal of Research in Christian Education 24, no. 1 [2015]: 63–77). A number of Babyak’s reflections are quite insightful and helpful. According to the abstract,

The current landscape in education is changing rapidly as online learning programs are experiencing great growth. As online learning grows, many professors and students are entering into new learning environments for the first time. While online learning has proven to be successful in many cases, it is not a journey upon which Christian professors or students should begin without some preparation. This article articulates a basic Christian teaching strategy by providing recommendations for those who are entering the online environment for the first time or desire to improve their online teaching effectiveness. These principles and recommendations are presented so that Christian professors can create Christian virtual environments in which they can have a significant impact on their students’ spiritual development in an online environment. It is critical that professors design their courses with the needs of online students in mind, ensuring that students of all learning styles are able to excel. Furthermore, professors should understand that online teaching often takes more time than traditional methods of teaching, increasing the importance of clear instructions and communication with students.

Free BASOR Issue and Classics Teaching Resources

Charles Jones notes that the May issue of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research is available for free online through July 31 and that ClassicsTeaching.com contains some valuable resources for teachers of classics, compiled by Steven Hunt (Cambridge) and Aisha Khan-Evans (University of London).

On the Web (June 25, 2012)

On the web:

Academic Stimulants?

Image representing New York Times as depicted ...
Image via CrunchBase

Sunday’s New York Times had a disquieting article about a potentially dramatic increase in substance abuse among teens for the sake of improved academic performance:

The boy exhaled. Before opening the car door, he recalled recently, he twisted open a capsule of orange powder and arranged it in a neat line on the armrest. He leaned over, closed one nostril and snorted it.

Throughout the parking lot, he said, eight of his friends did the same thing.

The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.

“Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.

For the full article, see here.

Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric

It seems like I’ve seen the site before, but Gideon Burton at Brigham Young University has digested a good deal of information about classical and Renaissance rhetoric at Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric. The site “is intended to help beginners, as well as experts, make sense of rhetoric, both on the small scale (definitions and examples of specific terms) and on the large scale (the purposes of rhetoric, the patterns into which it has fallen historically as it has been taught and practiced for 2000+ years).”