At Chapel Hill the normal teaching load is light by the standards of other colleges and non-research universities.  We teach two courses a semester.   Since I have so many graduate students that need seminars in the field, I always teach one undergraduate class (not always huge: in the Spring I’ll be doing a first year seminar for first year students, just fourteen of them), and one graduate seminar.  The graduate seminar normally as 6-10 PhD students in it.  And the teaching is *entirely*different from the undergraduate lecture class.  For graduate seminars we read texts in the original language (Greek) in advance each week, along with scholarship on those texts (either the NT, the apostolic fathers, the apocryphal Gospels – depending on which seminar I’m teaching) and discuss them in depth, both the original texts and the scholarship on them.

Well, I’ll have more to say about my teaching in future posts.  The reason I’m setting all this out is that this style of teaching is very very different from that found in the Colleges I’ve been lecturing to this week, as I’ll soon explain.

Dr. Bart Ehrman UNC Chapel Hill