I've made it a kind of hobby over the years to try and identify languages I may overhear in various public settings.  So when I overheard two fourth grade girls speaking a language I could not identify the other day, I was intrigued.  It clearly wasn't either French or Spanish and it wasn't Mandarin, although it could have been any of those three, given our various programs here.

It turned out to be a language called Natura, pronounced Nachuray, with a rolled "r."  The written version, which they produced for me at my request the following day, bears no resemblance to any written language I had every seen, although it does have a punctuation system.  I did begin to note a pattern in the symbols when I asked them to write their own names in Natura.  There was an exact correlation between the number of English letters in their names to the number of Natura letters.   

Clearly not content to simply communicate in any of the three existing linguistic choices available to them, these two enterprising fourth graders had created and were using their own language. It struck me as another example of "curriculum" happening outside the limits of the classroom and at the initiative of our students.  Our most recent edition of the newsletter explores the meaning of curriculum at MPA, how it evolves and changes over time and in response to changes in the world.

One critical measure of the effectiveness of any curriculum is the degree to which it inspires students to embrace, and take ownership of, their own learning. If your primary goal is to cram for the test, get a good grade, then forget what you learned, you're missing the whole point. We want students to go beyond the learning that has begun in the classroom or studio by, well, making up a new language. We want students to be open to the possibility that a new discovery lurks around every corner - in or out of school.    

As we approach the long summer break, we encourage families to look at the almost unlimited opportunities for learning "outside" the classroom. It would be possible to dismiss the creation of this language as the idle game of two fourth grade friends intent on creating a world of their own, a communication system of their own. But who is to say that these are not the beginnings of a much more sophisticated future study of culture as an outgrowth of language?

We salute these two young linguisitics majors and their initial study and application of the rules necessary to create a new language. We salute the five-year-old who, on your trip to the lake this summer, spends hours engineering the flow of water through sand canals on the beach. We salute the 13-year-old who imagines the life-stories of the people you meet and catalogues those narratives in her on-line diary.

We also encourage parents to promote a spirit of inquiry when it comes to these "extra-curricular" activities over the summer. The right kind of probing questions can initiate a fascinating conversation with a nine year-old: "How is French different than English?" "Why are rivers shaped the way they are?" "How has Harry Potter changed since the beginning of the first book?" And so on.  

We eagerly await hearing of these various learnings and explorations, in whatever language you choose, when you return in August for another year of growth and discovery at MPA.