Last week I was attended two national conferences in Atlanta: The American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). I presented a paper at ASOR on the ways that archaeology and archaeologists are presented in the cinematic arts. My presentation was in Keynote and included several quicktime movies. While it wasn't meant to be the most erudite of papers, it was very entertaining and informative, and several people afterwards commented that it was their favorite paper that year at ASOR, and about 20 people asked for copies to show to their students. I put a great deal of time into that presentation, and it was gratifying to have others comment positively. A few hours after that presentation, I was awarded the Frank Cross award by ASOR. The award is "presented to the editor/author of
the most substantial volume(s) related to ancient Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean epigraphy, text and/or tradition. This work must be the result of original research published during the past two years."

My friend and advisor Tom Levy gave me the award, and to be honored like that by my colleagues was the real high point in my academic career thus far. All in all it was a great conference. Now I've just got a couple of days before final exams. I've got to finish the student websites for THeo 2001 and create two final exams. I finished grading my Theology 1120 papers in which students applied a critical method to a biblical passage. They were OK papers, but the real highlight was that only one student plagiarized, and this was only slightly. This has been such a severe problem in the past, maybe word is out that I check on the web for this. Anyway, back to the grindstone.

Today I feel exhausted. I feel like my body is a battleground between forces of evil and good. Right now the evil parts are winning, and I feel like a bad cold is coming on, and can't really afford the time to be sick. Today I also heard that my book To Your Tents O Israel won an award from the American Schools of Oriental Research. That was great news. I find out more about this soon.

Yesterday a student complemented me saying I was the most animated and interesting teacher that he had. In my classes I really try to convey the enthusiasm I have for the subject, and I'm glad he noticed and voiced his opinion. Of course he is right. I am probably the best teacher ever.

Time seems to be one of the major issues confronting the use of technology. That and money I guess. But back to time . . . It used to be I'd sit in my office alone and work work work and work some more. Now not only do I meet with students during office hours, but also it seems like a half hour doesn't pass without some interuption. Mostly students visit my office to talk about their website projects, but also they have problems with blackboard quizzes or something else. I thoroughly enjoy the one on one contact with the students. They're full of life, bright, and the world is their oyster (or as they say here "urster"), it just takes away time that I used to use to write books and work on more academic things.

Today I'm sitting in my office working on a keynote lecture I'll be giving later in the day, and a student introduces herself. She is a 5th year senior, majoring in Chemistry, and she tells me she is taking both her upper and lower division theology courses with me next semester so she can graduate. Here at Xavier students must take an upper and lower division theology course as part of the core requirements. Anyway, she tells me she is nervous because there will be papers to write for my courses and she has never written a paper. This shocked me, and we spoke for a while, and she was as amazed about this as I was. I asked about English, and she said she had to take one ENglish class, and while papers were required, she didn't turn any in, and still got a B in the course. She explained this by saying it was the teacher's first year here at Xavier. Then I asked about philosophy, and she said she is taking logic to satisfy this requirement and no papers. It miraculously seems like Theology is the only place here on campus that is teaching students to write. This explains to me partly why students have such a difficult time with these assigments, and why the writing suffers from so many errors, including subject verb agreement, possessives, and misspellings. I think this student will have a hard time in my class, when suddenly she will have two classes with four papers in each class. We talked about the writing center and other resources. Anyway, I was amazed that someone could complete four years of college at Xavier (or anywhere) and never have had to write a paper. Incredible.

Tonight I should be able to finish digitizing the movies that I'll need for my presentation in a couple of weeks. Some of these films are quite bad, but some are good. I wish I could capture the images clearer. I project the vhs and dvd clips onto a wall and record them with a digital movie camera. Some, especially VHS, look grainy. We'll see how they turn out. I will have to spend a great deal of time in the next couple of weeks organizing the clips into sections, such as archaeology as science, alcohol and archaeology, etc. This project has eaten up a great deal of time. When the clips are relevant, I show them to my students who really enjoy them.

Today I've been meeting with my Theology 2001 groups who are designing websites. In retrospect, I probably should have had more checkpoints earlier to guide them. I've noticed many groups have put off this project and haven't put in the work required up until this point. Yet, some groups have amazed me at the research and insight they've put into this. I like how each group has had to split up the project, with each member being responsible for a critical methodology and applying it to their passage. Then in the end, as a group, they'll put all their parts together. But some groups of course have members that aren't quite as motivated as they should be. When I was a student, this is why I hated group projects. Here at Xavier I've been told repeatedly about the merits of group projects, mostly because this is how the world will often work they graduate. But there is a huge difference, in that members that slack off can get fired in the real world. Overall I've been pleased with the projects, but now it's crunch time, and we'll see how they come together. It seems I have to invest in a floppy disk drive, as I can currently only read CD, DVD and Zip, not 3.5 floppies, which is what the students have. Teaching with technology is pretty darn expensive.

Today in my Theology 2001 course, The Torah of Israel, I brought in my model of the Tabernacle and reinacted the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) sacrifice. This is always a popular lecture, mostly because I get a student volunteer to wear an outfit of the High Priest which I made. They then use the urim and thummim to see which goat will be the scapegoat. When talking about this desert demon named Azazel, I showed clips from the movie Exorcist where a priest/archaeologist digs up a Pazuza statue in northern Iraq, and thus unleashes this unholy spirit who takes over that girl. Why do most horror films start with archaeologists finding something? Anyway, the model of the Tabernacle along with altars and goats with blood on the horns of the altar etc I think really lets students see how a very important holiday in the Bible would have been inacted. Plus they get to see a classmate look funny dressed as the high priest.

Whewwww! I just finished putting all my quizzes into Blackboard for the semester. I decided to try this out for the current semester. When I came to Xavier I felt it necessary to give quizzes to make sure students were doing the readings before class. I would usually give these out on Friday of MWF sections, and Thursday of TTh sections. But, these took away about 15 minutes of classtime, and often students would come in late and I would be spineless and let them take it. In short, it was becoming a problem. So I learned blackboard. I now put all of my reserve articles on it in .doc or .pdf format, and all the class handouts. Everything except the textbooks. This has been very popular with the students, though it has made this semester rough as I try to get all the articles typed out about a week before they are due. Anyway, when I teach these courses in the future it should be easier. Well, back to the quizzes. I put five questions from each day's reading assignment on blackboard, and using the random pool option each student is presented with 3 randomly selected multiple-choice questions from the pool of 5. They are given a five minute time limit, and the quizzes go offline when class starts. Thus, they have to take the quiz before the class for which they were assigned. In the end, there will be 30 quizzes, which makes 90 quiz questions. I will drop the lowest 3 quiz scores. If I take the huge amount of time involved in making up the quizzes and setting up blackboard properly, these have been great. The students I find are really doing the reading more closely, and they are coming to class prepared. Also, I don't have to spend any class time going over the quizzes. Once in a while there has been a problem. Blackboard, or more likely, Xavier's server was down for a few days. I simply postponed the due date for that quiz. Also, once in a while the students think a question might not have been worded properly, or something similar, or their computer froze. These I deal with on an individual basis. Anyway, hallelujah, I now have all the quizzes on blackboard for all of my courses this semester. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to work on my atlas.

Technology has been sucking up my life. Not literally. It’s just that lately about 80% of my waking hours involves fiddling with cables and rebooting my computer. This is mostly because of two things. First, I’ve switched from PowerPoint to Keynote, and this takes a great deal of time to learn the new software and to make the PowerPoint features fit. It is such a huge disadvantage that Keynote does not have hyperlinks, and I really hope they put this into the next edition. Second, technology is eating away at my life because I’ve been digitizing all sorts of video and DVD. I have a presentation coming up for the American Schools of Oriental Research, and my paper covers the way archaeology and archaeologists have been portrayed in film. So I either convert from video using an analog converter at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, or more recently, I’ve shown DVD and VHS films using a projector onto a bedsheet on the wall, and then film this with the audio going into the mike jack on the camera. Then I have to export these from imovie to quicktime. I’ve got some great clips, such as the Mole People, Laura Croft, Exorcist, Mummy, and of course Indiana Jones, but my God this eats up time. Also money. I had to pay about $50 to get my hands on this old movie called Skullduggery in which Burt Reynolds of all people plays an archaeologist. Hopefully I can get most of this recorded and exported into quicktime in the next couple of weeks. I’ve got a bunch of writing that needs attention, especially the Bible atlas I’m working on as well as my website BibleDudes. Bart Everson at CAT has been very helpful in working with me on digitizing the film clips. The ones that I’ve shown in class, such as a Seinfeld clip where Newman is like Solomon, have been very well received.