Conlangs in education

Today's (May 31, 2005) New York Times has a column by Stanley Fish
(identified as "dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago"), which says in
part:

"On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this
assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each
group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax,
a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching
your language to fellow students. The language you create cannot be English or
a slightly coded version of English, but it must be capable of indicating the
distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like -
that English enables us to make."

That's available on line, if you register, at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html?

Doug