The Great Akkadian Final Exam
While I was writing about my mother reading Hebrew yesterday, I recalled another person who was substantially involved in my Biblical Languages training, Dr. Leona Glidden Running. She was a Biblical Languages professor at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary when I took my MA from the Andrews University graduate school and was my academic advisor.
But this short story has to do with her as a languages teacher. I wanted to take Akkadian as part of my program, but there were no other students taking it, so I got my program one on one. It was a one quarter course that should have been a one year course. It turned out that there was only one test, the final, which would be open book.
Come the day of the test, she walked in, put before me a legal size sheet of paper crammed with cuneiform text front and back and told me I had two hours. The print was medium smallish, and with my one quarter of work, I was relatively certain I couldn’t come close to translating this. There was, however, no point arguing with Dr. Running. One just dug in a worked.
So I plowed forward as fast as I could, not spending the time rechecking some signs that I would have liked, and making the best sense of the inscription that I could. I can’t even remember what it was, though I’m thinking it was something from Ashurbanipal, and had some narrative sense to help me. Nonetheless I only got done half of one side, which will tell you just how far I had gotten in learning Akkadian–hardly reading knowledge!
Well, I turned in the test, thinking it was an abysmal performance. A couple days later I got it back with only a few corrections and a grade of ‘A’. With more curiosity than good sense I asked just how I could get an ‘A’ for translating about a quarter of the assigned text.
“Oh, I never expected you to translate it all. I just didn’t want you to have time to check and revise your work!”
Oh.
Well.
Great story! What a great teacher, teaching that learning a language isn’t about knowing it all. In fact, isn’t knowing languages learning them, Dr. Running?
Having Dr. Running for an advisor was an education in itself. She had a formative role on my views of women in the church as well.
But she was hard to keep up with!
I had the exact same experience in a Greek reading class as an undergraduate, though we were given a vocab list of words that occur less than 10x in the NT. Dr. Jon Laansma gave us 45 minutes to translate as much as we could of 2 Timothy.
We actually had several of these texts throughout the semester, but after the first one we knew what was coming, so it wasn’t as much of a shock when he told us, e.g., to start at Hebrew 4:15 and go as far as we could. Good memories.
I would guess that later instances would be somewhat less unsettling.
I do recall an undergraduate professor who, also without warning, gave an essay test on which we had to answer one of three questions. Sounds easy, no?
The questions sounded like they came from the certification test for senior generalists: Define the universe, give three examples. In any case, what he expected was for you to narrow the focus of the question to some key aspect and write on that, and part of your grade was based on the importance of the aspect you chose to talk about.
War stories about professors — this could go on awhile!