And so it begins…
In less than two hours I begin the first of five final exams over the next week. Greek today, Hebrew tomorrow (Dear Dr. Green, reader of this blog, have I ever told you that you’re my favorite teacher? No? Well, if you’re still writing that exam…you are my favorite teacher, so fair and compassionate, so considerate of his students, so mindful of the weak and foolish things of this world…), then Hermeneutics next Tuesday, Old Testament Introduction on Wednesday, and a grand finale of Doctrine of God on Friday. As the last eraser bits fall to the ground off my DoG blue book, we’ll be headed off to the Jersey shore for our church’s prospective members’ retreat. Let’s see if there’s room in the PCA for these two (so far) unrepentant Baptists!
At moments like this I begin to understand why some people, when they hear I am taking WTS Greek and Hebrew at the same time, look at me like my mother must’ve dropped me on my head Perhaps she did. I’ll have to ask her when she gets back from Europe.
At least I’m not having the anxiety and sense of panic I did before my first exams last winter. Getting through those (and somehow doing better than I thought possible) has made facing this new set a little more bearable. I look at my Greek NT and Hebrew OT…and I can actually read some of it, which is utterly amazing to me.
Just don’t ask me to parse any verbs. Yeesh!
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May 12th, 2005 at 9:04 am
Mark…thanks for the post…take courage! It’ll all be over in 8 days. And Dr. Green, if you’re reading the COMMENTS as well as the blog, please note that i, too, think you’re the nicest, coolest, most merciful, most Australian professor i’ve had since–oh, at least four months ago.
May 12th, 2005 at 10:59 am
“At least I’m not having the anxiety and sense of panic I did before my first exams last winter.”
Clearly, you haven’t seen the Hebrew final.
Doug
May 12th, 2005 at 11:22 am
That’s awesome.
May 12th, 2005 at 11:41 am
Man, I’m very, very glad that none of my tool school profs ever read anything I had to say about classes …
May 12th, 2005 at 12:16 pm
DG:
I think Mark speaks for all of us when he says “Just don’t ask me to parse any verbs”; to which I might add “. . . or nouns.”
Thank you.
May 12th, 2005 at 12:41 pm
Shhhh, Jason! Don’t put ideas in his head!
May 12th, 2005 at 12:43 pm
OK, Greek was actually easy…which makes me think, what with the balance of the cosmos at stake and all, that Hebrew will probably be killer.
May 12th, 2005 at 12:47 pm
This is rich. Jason joins the chorus and pleads for mercy. OK, I can deal with that. But you hide behind your “Vos page,” pretending to be blogless. But thanks to your good friend Mark, I’ve tracked you down too … now go read your own blog … and my comments!
Be afraid, be very afraid.
PS At least Mark had the good sense to suck up to me. No wonder they call him the Sage. A sycophant sage, but a sage nonetheless.
May 12th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
Still sucking up here! Yessiree!
(And hopefully not dropping the “up” part of that by this time tomorrow.)
May 12th, 2005 at 5:26 pm
So is it more efficient to suck up and plead for mercy via one’s blog or in person? Just to be safe, I should probably try both.
May 12th, 2005 at 5:30 pm
Kyle, I think we’ll probably get the same test suckuppance or not.
May 12th, 2005 at 6:24 pm
Is it just me, or is DG actually fueling our procrastination?
I think that when exams are over, we need to be on “blogger patrol” by his office, each stopping in at least once a day to make sure that he is actually grading exams and not lost in the blogosphere somewhere.
And fear…at this stage in the game? Come on, we all know that at this point it just kicks into apathy…at least for me it does. And that’s a much bigger problem.
May 12th, 2005 at 6:31 pm
Don’t worry Denise…seems Jason established the Doug blogwatch after the midterms
And :yes: on the apathy thing…actually with me it isn’t so much apathy as sheer weariness. I just spent four hours…FOUR HOURS…going through all the 50+ vocab cards. Every time I do that I get filled with despair over how many I’ve forgotten. It becomes an absurd contest to see how many I can hold in my head until the sight translation tomorrow…and then they all come spilling out again to make way for names and dates and places from OTI and Hermeneutics and Doc of God that I will have forgotten by the end of the summer.
There’s something wrong with the pedagogy of the WTS evaluation system. It smells way too much like “we suffered this way under the old school profs, so you will too.” All teachers (including Enns, who assigned it) should read the Clines essay from OTI. Yes, he’s a bit wacked, but he has a point when he says that he never requires his students to learn anything they will forget.
***end of rant***
May 12th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
The good thing is that you only need remove one Hebrew word, and its English equivalent, to make room for your OTI exam: incarnational . . . analogy.