Bob Patrick

Thank you Bob. Y’all can put bios here or send them to me as an email. However you do it, I can then make a separate blog post from your bios and then put them in the Group Members category. Dec. 1 is still the deadline. Bios do so much to increase the overall feeling of community not to mention safety on this site. Here is Bob’s:
Not sure if this is the right place to put my bio, but here goes. I’ve been teaching Latin for 23 years. Early in my teaching experience, it became clear to me that the traditional grammar-translation approach was only working for a few of my students in every class. I tried everything I could think of to make a difference, but everything I could think of only mirrored what Latin teachers had done to/for me. I would not know for many, many years that I was one of the “four-percenters” and that my efforts were coming from that place.
While teaching Latin, I was doing addititional work on a certification in Spanish, and my Spanish professors were conducting classes entirely in Spanish. One, in particular, was especially inspiring to me, and it raised the question: why can’t I teach Latin that way? And then: why shoudn’t I teach Latin that way? And then: what do I need to do to get myself ready to teach Latin this way?
I began by creating scripts for myself of all the classroom management things I did so that I could do that part of my teaching in Latin. It’s been a long journey since then. I found total immersion weeks in the summer in Latin and began attending them in 2000. In 2004 I attended a workshop with Stephen Krashen in Atlanta, and then in 2006 I attended a TPRS workshop in Atlanta with Jason Fritze. But, up until then for about 7 years, I had continued to increase my work in Latin as Latin and to help students find ways to work that way without translation. I only found the terms “Comprehensible Input” in Blaine Ray’s book and had been working from the book for a couple of years before Jason’s workshop.
Since then, I have actually offered a number of workshops for Latin teachers who want to engage students with CI and communicate with them in Latin because it’s the best way for all learners to make progress in the language regardless of what their end goals are for studying Latin.
I have long been convinced that language work is human work. It’s about relationships, interaction, communication, the heart, feelings, what matters most. When you say that out loud, conjugation and declension charts just frost on the periphery of things. As long as I teach, I will be a learner of my craft. It is clear to me, that every day, I walk into my classroom with an art to craft with these wonderful human beings. I am such a lucky guy!