A very poignant story from Bob Patrick:
I had one of those moments that, well, I simply needed in my life even though I didn’t know I needed it. I was working at my desk after school a Monday or so ago, and there was a knock at the outside door of my classroom. There, on the outside, stood an Army soldier in full fatigues and cap. I wondered who and what this was about. Fortunately, his name was on the top of his uniform, and I realized before I opened the door that this was a former student of mine.
He studied Latin with me for four years of high school and graduated three years ago. He had headed off to college, and to quote him, because he had skated through high school, never studying and passing, he thought it would be a workable strategy in college. By the end of his first year, he had flunked out and lost his scholarship. In my Latin classes he had always been the underwhelming gifted student.
Flunking out shook him up, and he enlisted in the Army. The ASVAB test results redirected him through the Army to the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, CA where, after taking one of their tests, was matched with the Thai language (a category III language on the Institute’s chart). He was thirteen weeks in to 8 hours a day of language study when his appendix ruptured and he went into the hospital. At the DLI, missing one day of class bumps you out of the program. Due to his circumstances, his absence for hospitalization did bump him out but he was allowed to start over, in Spanish, after his recovery.
He has now finished the Spanish program at DLI which included a month of living in Puerto Rico, has trained for a position in intelligence. Of 15 candidates in the program working in Spanish language, he was one of five to pass the training, and the only non-native speaker among the five. He just learned that he has been accepted/appointed to West Point where he will begin college, again, this summer.
He came by to see me, he said, because he wanted me to know what a difference learning Latin with me had made in his life. (This was a shock to me. He had, indeed, skated through—even four years of Latin, and I never saw him really live up to his potential in my classes). He said that learning Latin immersively, in a room where we spoke Latin from day one, where I would not let them get a way with speaking in English, where I insisted that they learn a Latin word in Latin and not simply as an English equivalent (these were his descriptions, but they are fairly accurate of how I teach) made it possible for him to know, immediately, in the DLI how things worked. He said that the amount of Spanish vocabulary that he knew from Latin was huge, and that even though Thai was so different from anything he knew, he knew that instructors were going to speak to him in Thai and that the goal, from day one, was to understand things in Thai with the various kinds of help (I would call it Comprehensible Input) that they were giving him.
Made my day. And week. And maybe the year(s). I invited him back the next Friday where he spoke, over the course of the day, to about 600 Latin and Spanish students about his experience. We videotaped him so that other language teachers could show it to their classes, too. He convinced me, again, that what I am doing—teaching Latin as a living language, using Comprehensible Input, TPRS, and focusing on the acquisition of language rather than lots of knowledge about the language, is exactly what I should do and more, what I want to do. It works. It makes a difference. I know that this young man was as much or more a part of his own success as anything I did. I know that without any question. I am also convinced that I gave him an experience that he was able to take and run with when he finally decided that skating through life wasn’t working for him.
As Ben Slavic says, this kind of work is powerful and it has the power to change lives. Here’s an example, and it’s the kind of example that keeps on giving.