Monthly Archive

On Monday, I officially received word that I have been granted a Keith and Dorothy Mackay Postgraduate Travelling Scholarship by the University. This means that I can afford to go to the International meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Auckland in July to present the paper I have had accepted in the Psychological Hermeneutics of Biblical Themes and Texts Unit. Actually, as I said to one of the members of the selection committee who greeted me yesterday with “so, you’re going to Auckland”, we would have found the money somehow to get me there, but this means my family won’t need to give up things so I can go swanning off overseas.

I don’t know who Keith and Dorothy Mackay were, but they made a very generous bequest to the university quite some time ago, the interest from which makes it possible to offer scholarships to students doing their honours year and to postgrads who have had papers accepted at international conferences or who have arranged for an attachment to a university overseas for research purposes. The honours scholarships make a huge difference to needy students. One recipient I know was so pleased that her “Keith and Dorothy” meant that she could afford to buy text books and some new shoes and jeans and pay her rent and eat.

The prospect of presenting is not a little daunting. I’ve presented papers at international conferences before, but they’ve been chaplaincy conferences. This is my first presentation of my doctoral work outside the university.

Our new international students begin to arrive this week and I am actively involved in orientation activities for both them and the domestic students.  We then have to “bed down” the semester’s bible study and discussion programmes, so I don’t anticipate having much time to blog or read or think about anything much other than chaplaincy in the next few weeks.

Tim Bulkeley at SansBlogue has tagged me with the book meme. The instructions are:

Grab the nearest book.

1. Open the book to page 123.
2. Find the fifth sentence.
3. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
4. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
5. Tag five others with the infection.

I am just back from three days in Sydney at a university chaplains’ training session with my denomination (this included a 6 hour drive each way) and have been internetless for that whole time. My supposedly ADSL connection is running like a 33K modem, to quote my daughter who has recently returned from Germany “Ich habe die Schnupfeln seit Donnerstag” (or perhaps that should be “seit Donnerstag die Schnupfeln?) and it’s all a bit much, so tagging five others is beyond me. I also need to cheat because the closest book is Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage by Martin Durrell and working out what might actually qualify as the fifth sentence on p 123 is really challenging. The one below it on the pile, however is Memory in Oral Traditions by David C Rubin (New York, Oxford. Oxford University Press, 1995).

The fifth sentence on p 123 is “How does the degree of learning affect later retention?” And for anyone who is interested, the answer is:

Over a wide range of initial learning form no learning to twice as many repetitions as are needed to just learn a list, and over a range of retention intervals up to 2 weeks, the more times a list is learned, the better retention will be.

So now you know.  Or maybe not.  Seeing I’m not actually up to p 123, I can’t really explain exactly why this is important, but I’m sure it will all become clear.

And seeing I’m not up to trying to tag anyone, if you would like to be part of this meme and no-one has tagged you yet, feel free to participate and say that I tagged you. I am quite happy to add your name retrospectively if you link here.

I think that in small group theory this means that I am taking on the role of the Includer.  We had a session on small group theory which was quite helpful except that one member of my group decided that he wanted to play a new part called A**hole (his word, not mine), which made the group exercise rather fraught.  As went the buzz-phrase for the weekend “If I wasn’t a pacifist, I would have killed him”.  Last night I learned to play a card game called Warlords and Scumbags and saw the movie V for Vendetta.  We decided that V is not a Christ figure, regardless of what might have been intended - Christ didn’t kill people to get revenge.

And now I think I should go to bed and hope that my brain is in gear for finalising the program for orientation for new international students tomorrow.