One thing that I’m not doing is blogging here. I wish I were. I have some interesting ideas from time to time that I would love to get down in writing. But I have a few minutes on a Friday evening and I thought I might provide a snapshot of what’s going on that might interest some of any remaining readers.<\/p>\n
Teaching.<\/strong> My primary work is in the classroom. This takes about 43 hours of my week, as I spend significant time preparing and grading for four classes. This semester I am teaching two sections of Old Testament Survey I, with a total of 135 students. While I’ve taught this for the past three years, I feel that there is much to improve and I take a little time each week to tweak the notes and powerpoints. Since most of these students are freshmen, I apply a little extra effort to help them make the transition to college, especially through rejecting weekly papers that are wrinkled, unstapled, or improperly formatted.<\/p>\n I am teaching New Testament Survey I (Gospels and Acts) for the first time in three years and I am loving it. But I did such a poor job the first time around that I am doing a major overhaul of the lectures. My fourth class is an upper-division Bible elective on the Psalms. This is my smallest course with 36 students, but it receives more attention than my other three classes combined. I have especially loved preparing for (and teaching) Psalms 16, 22, and 45. I am looking forward to teaching 69, 72, 80, and 110.<\/p>\n Photo Companion to the Bible.<\/strong> In theory, this receives more time than all other items on this list after teaching. For the last two years, I’ve been working with a terrific team in developing a verse-by-verse photo guide to the Bible. I am very excited about how useful and accessible this will be for Bible teachers and students. I am hoping to release the Gospels in a few months. But I’ve been saying that for a year now. The problem is that we keep creating and discovering new great content. Last week we were refining a possible reconstruction of the sign on the cross, with the help of an expert creator of ancient fonts. This week we ‘re working on some new coin photos. I think if I had four weeks to do nothing else, I could get version 1.0 out the door. <\/p>\n Turkey\/Greece Trip.<\/strong> For many years I picked up groups at the airport in Israel and toured them around, largely unmindful of the work required to organize and prepare these groups in the States. Now I am getting a taste of that as I prepare to lead a TMU group to biblical sites for 17 days in late December and early January. A number of elements have me very excited about the trip. As I am able, I hope to spend some significant time reading and studying about the sites we ‘ll be visiting. Some of that will count towards my goal of reading 50 books this year.<\/p>\n Sunday School.<\/strong> For two and a half years now, I have co-taught an adult Sunday School class. We began with Genesis 1 and this weekend we are in Numbers 3. We usually study a chapter a week, and I do the preparation whether I teach or not. Though I could gain some precious hours if I didn’t have this commitment, the weekly study is one of the favorite things I do. And now I can truly say that I love Leviticus.<\/p>\n Family.<\/strong> Our family does not hang out every evening for 3-4 hours playing games and watching TV, but we do enjoy both serious and fun times together each week. We ‘ve been reading through a book series lately, memorizing Psalm 25, and are now preparing for a weekend trip to Yosemite. A few weeks ago I took the boys to the last Dodgers home game with Vin Scully’s farewell. Tomorrow we ‘ll do some clean-up in the yard. <\/p>\n So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. I have not been writing a book, playing the piano, watching Cowboys games, or training for a marathon. Perhaps there will be time for those things later. For now I am thankful for some good opportunities to serve others and be blessed through it all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One thing that I’m not doing is blogging here. I wish I were. I have some interesting ideas from time to time that I would love to get down in writing. But I have a few minutes on a Friday evening and I thought I might provide a snapshot of what’s going on that might\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}