Languages at The Academy
Every student chooses a modern language in kindergarten and studies it for nine years. French or Spanish. In sixth grade, everyone adds Latin.
Nine years is the number that matters. Most schools introduce a language in middle school, or rotate children through a sampler of several, and both approaches tend to produce children who can recite colors and numbers and not much else. We went the other way. One language, nine consecutive years, taught seriously enough that a student leaves eighth grade able to use it.
Latin, sixth grade, everyone.
Latin is what makes the modern language click. A student who has been in French or Spanish since kindergarten meets Latin and suddenly sees the machinery underneath: why the verb endings behave that way, where the irregular forms came from, what the two languages have in common. Grammar stops being a set of arbitrary rules and becomes history you can trace.
Choosing a language
Families choose at kindergarten entry. Both tracks run parallel, K through 8, with the same hours and the same expectations.
French
French has been part of an Academy education since the beginning, and it is not here out of habit.
We teach it because of what it does to a child’s ear and to their thinking. French sounds are not English sounds, and a five-year-old can still hear the difference in a way an adult mostly cannot. Nine years of that builds something a later start does not.
It also sits closest to the rest of what we teach. A student conjugating Latin in sixth grade has already been conjugating in French since kindergarten, and the two illuminate each other immediately. French is the language of a literature students will read for the rest of their education, and it opens onto Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish later with very little friction.
For families who speak French at home, the reasoning is the same as it is for Spanish. The home language becomes academic content, with grammar, literature, and formal writing, taught seriously rather than left to the dinner table.
Spanish
Spanish runs kindergarten through eighth grade on the same nine-year arc as French, with the same hours and the same expectations. We added it for a plain reason: California has more Spanish speakers than any other state, and a Berkeley child who studies Spanish for nine years graduates with a language they will use on the walk home, at work, and across this state for the rest of their life. For families who speak Spanish at home, the home language becomes academic content, with grammar, literature, and formal writing, taught seriously rather than left to the dinner table.