In this section, Prof. Arthur Bahr describes how 21L.601J has evolved in the years he has been teaching it.
The course has been pretty stable since its first incarnation. I’ve varied some texts, and recently cut down the amount of Aelfric and Bede I assign in the second third of the class. But it still moves very fast, without much slack built into the syllabus such as I’ve tried to in other classes. So I’ve been thinking through ways of doing so in future.
One adjustment I’ve already made is to the weighting of exams. The first third of the class, covering grammar, is much easier if one already knows a case-based language. Not every student does, of course, and for them, the learning curve can feel dauntingly steep. So I’ve reweighted the three exams, which used to be 25% each (with attendance and participation 15% and daily vocabulary quizzes 10%), to be either 25% each as before, or 15%-25%-35%, whichever works to the individual student’s advantage. This variable weighting levels the playing field without penalizing anybody (since MIT, to its great credit, does not allow curving of grades).
Another innovation that I made in Spring 2023 was to have the grammar lectures and exam preparations videotaped, to be posted to the online class site and now to OCW as well. My short-term goal was to make that content available for students who had to be absent that day, or who would benefit from the ability to review it. By sharing the videos on OCW, I hope to make it possible for folks to study Old English on their own, and to offer some models for other instructors who’d like to bring Old English to their institution. It’s such a wonderful language.
If folks would like to get a sense of the class dynamic, here’s a clip from the review session before the first exam, just four weeks into the semester. The students have done a mock exam with sight translation using vocabulary memorized from Stephen Barney’s Word-Hoard. In this clip, a student takes us through one of the sight translation sentences from the first mock exam. It’s pretty impressive how much they can do after just four weeks!
