Jason Weaver

I started teaching Greek in 2003, using the standard grammar-translation approach. For 5 years I taught a couple of hundred students Greek using the Basics of Biblical Greek by William Mounce and Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics by Daniel Wallace. The courses were enjoyable to me, and profitable to several of the students. But there was a pretty high 'mortality' rate, as many struggled to process the information I was teaching in a meaningful way.

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In 2008 I was introduced to Living Biblical Greek by Randall Buth, which a more natural language learning approach like one would use with a modern language. This approach made much more sense to me, to learn the language itself by usage rather than merely to learn about the language, and so in 2009 I began to incorporate similar methods into my Greek classes.

 

For the next couple of years I experimented with how to incorporate living language methods into a traditional classroom setting. The limited amount of class time was the biggest challenge. I learned that one key to making things work in that format is to make heavy use of homework that the student does outside of class.

 

In 2013 I began teaching courses in a full-time format. Instead of fitting into a typical college or seminary format of once or twice a week, my courses ran for 5-6 hours a day with 1-2 hours of homework. Over the next few years my full-time course expanded from 4 weeks to 6 weeks, and then to 8 weeks. The course was aimed at current and future bible translators so I wanted to make sure they had some exegetical skill at the end of the course. That led me to work hard and create a course that used living language methods but at the same time taught basic exegetical competency. 

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In the last several years I have also taught multiple in-person courses much shorter in nature. Doing so has taught me that a lot can effectively be done in shorter increments, you just have to have realistic goals and focus the course/seminar in that direction.

 

I have also taught Greek extensively online in various contexts. I've taught online courses independently, with Biblingo, and with Omilein. There are ways to maximize the online classroom that are different from in-person courses.

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At the time of writing, I am planning to join forces with Randall Buth and help run/teach an experimental 9-month Koine immersion program near Athens, Greece.