Bob Patrick shares with us some exciting things going on in Florida in the next few days. I should say, very exciting:
Dear Ben,
I am heading to Orlando tomorrow for the ACTFL conference where I will be one of five candidates for Teacher of the Year. I am sharing here with you my mock speech. Each candidate (after turning in up to 50 pages in portfolio months ago) will be interviewed for 30 minutes. We will each be asked questions about culture in the classroom, professional involvement, and the value of language study. Then, we will each be asked to deliver, without notes, the first 5 minutes of a 10 minute speech to a civic organization around issues in language learning. What follows is mine. I am writing it without notes as at this point, I’ve “got it”. Thank you all for your wonderful support here in every area of my work. My interview is at 9 AM on Thursday, Nov. 21, and the Award Ceremony will be on Friday at 6:30 PM.
“I am a world language teacher. I teach Latin in a large public high school. I believe in two things: equality in the classroom and a humanistic approach to teaching.
Equality in the classroom means that everyone who wants to take Latin can, and everyone in my Latin classes makes progress. No failures. For the 12 years that I have taken this attitude, I have had virtually no failures. But, when I tell people this, they don’t believe me. So, let me ask you: have you ever had an “ah ha” moment in the middle of a test when it was too late to do anything about it? When that happens to my students, I tell them: okay, so now you know what it is you need to know. Come in tomorrow morning and let’s work on this, and then you can take this test over again.
I would love it if all my students had their “ah ha” moments before the test, but when the lights come on during a test, what I am interested in is that that the lights have come on, not that they came on after I expected them to.
A student failure is my failure. I tell my students: Look, I am going to be here every day, working with you, and we are going to find what it takes to help you turn things around. That’s called a humanistic approach to teaching.
Everyone loves to be seen. On the first day of school, I ask my students to take out a piece of paper and answer two questions: what is important to you: and, why does it matter? I spend 2-3 hours reading all of their responses that night. They write extraordinary things. They write ordinary things like: I love my family. And, playing softball is important to me. Others say things like: I have a rare blood disease and the doctor says I won’t ever have a normal life.
They share important things with me, and that allows me to really see them. When I see them, they will allow me, and my language, to enter their world. What does all of this have to do with world languages and Latin–because that is my language?
Let me ask you this: how often are you aware of electricity in your life? You know that it’s there. You depend on it. And yet, probably most of the time you don’t think too much about it or how it works. If something goes wrong, there’s always someone to call. But, what if there weren’t? Can you imagine a time when we took electricity so for granted that we stopped teaching anyone about it or how the electrical infrastructure worked? How foolish would that be?
Did you know that the Ancient Romans had running water in their houses and all their public buildings? Did you know that they had a vast sewage system? Did you know that by the middle ages there was no one left who knew how to make them work? It was the perfect set up for The Plague.
I propose to you that Latin is the cultural and linguistic electricity of Western Civilization. Latin, like no other language, connects the dots of all the major and many of the minor languages of the West. Ancient Roman civilization, cultural traditions, religion, literatures, political systems, sports and entertainment, even superstitions all inform and help us understand what has evolved in the West.
The founders of the United States were no less politically divided than our modern political leaders are. Each of them were classicists who read and wrote in Latin and Greek. They had access to the classically big ideas which enabled them to create this experiment that became the United States of America. I wonder if our political leaders understand enough about this kind of cultural and linguistic electricity to repair a failed political system today?
That’s why we need Latin. That’s why we need World Languages. That’s why we must teach with good and exciting methods. That’s why we must deliver understandable messages in ALL our languages so that every student in the room can make progress. I have devoted the last 15 years of my 25 years of teaching to being that kind of World Language teacher. This is what we know: there is no such thing as students who are gifted to learn languages and those who are not. There are simply human beings who are capable of learning languages. Let me show you how.
Bob Patrick