I’m reminded of this line from Ecclesiastes every year when I visit the book exhibit at SBL. I know that I have not yet published a book, but I’m becoming less and less impressed when people tell me that they have. Quite frankly, I’m also becoming more and more convinced that some publishers will put out just about anything. It’s just a shame that books that are of value sometimes get lost in the shuffle.
And, by the way Joel it appears you didn’t ruin my video ;-).
I’ll take that as a compliment. It was great meeting you too Steve.
Great things will be happening among the biblioblogs in coming months. Hate that I had to leave the biblioblogging session early and arrived late at that. But, fantastic presentations by Barber and McGrath. Reenergized me for blogging quite a bit now that I’m trying to wrap up the dissertation. What a great atmosphere among the people in the room!
Comments Off on Best session so far – Jo Ann Hacket review My favorite session so far at SBL was the applied linguistics session focusing on the new grammars of Daniel Webster and Jo Ann Hackett, though the session was far more heavily weighted toward Hackett’s text. The most interesting part of the session was the reviews. And, what made the reviews interesting was that two of the reviewers of Hackett’s text were former students of hers.
You could tell that Martien Halvorson-Taylor and Vivian Johnson both had a profound respect for Hackett. It made me wish that I could at some point sit in on one of her classes. She must be a fantastic teacher in the classroom.
Both Halvorson-Taylor and Johnson had many wonderful things to say about the grammar; however, the most interesting part was when they came to criticisms. To criticize Hackett made both of them seem a little bit uncomfortable. But, you could then tell that their criticisms were genuine.
All in all, it made me consider the type of instructor I would like to be regardless of the discipline. Whether one teaches Hebrew or Old Testament or whatever, we ought to strive to have the kind of relationship with students that breeds the kind of mutual respect that I saw between Hackett and her former students. And, we ought to strive to develop students who are one day strong enough and competent enough to stand up and offer us criticism, but we’ll know that criticism is genuine and meant constructively because of the relationship that we have built with them.
The people … Caught up with Karyn and Daniel & Tonya a bit. Looking forward to doing more of the same tonight.
Ran into a few folks from the Bible software consultation last week, Tarsee Li who helped me out majorly with some testing for my dissertation, and a couple of other bloggers.
So much learning happens in the side discussions that you have with the people you build friendships with. Well worth the price of admission in itself.
And I might just post something about the sessions later too …
Comments Off on Leaving for SBL Atlanta I’m Getting ready to board a train for Atlanta. I’ve been wrapping some things up on my dissertation and have been out of the loop. Leave me a comment if there’s anything going on I should know about. Or, drop me a line if you hang out for one reason or another.
I’ll be at the Biblioblogger dinner tomorrow night.