The View from Here:
Nursery Rhymes, Catholic Mass, and WebCT

Lynne K. Fukuda
Instructor, Institute of Biology, Hawaii Pacific University
lfukuda@hawaii.edu

One fateful Sunday, as I sat in the pew at mass in a small Catholic church in rural Hawaii, the Sacred Heart in Pahoa (where mass was said in Hawaiian in the very early morning) thoughts floated to me with clarity. I nearly jumped out of the pew, which certainly would have shocked people since everyone else was deep in prayer as the priest led the chants. Being a very distracted Christian, my mind had somehow drifted on to a different dimension. This is not to say that I am a bad Catholic all the time. I do appreciate the words I hear and the prayers that are said--and yet, in my semi-dream like state, I am sometimes transported to different places.

My strange ideas pop up in the middle of the night, while I am eating, sitting in a tub, or watching TV. Almost immediately, I jump up to find a pencil or tell my new idea to the next person who is unfortunate enough to be close to me to be buried in a flurry of words. "IjustgotagreatideaIhavetotry," I would start like a person speaking in tongues, or jabber away like a psychopath. Then I run to get the materials I might need.

I watched the priest pray in a calm but monotone voice. I was lulled into a sleep-like state. But we had to rise, and my sleepiness dissipated. We chanted, sang, or murmured the words that had been memorized. All this time, our senses were flooded with the sights, the sounds, the smells, the touch, and the taste of worship. We saw the stained glass with images, marveled at the paintings and statues, looked up at the ceiling, heard the music of the organ and other instruments, smelled the incense and flowers, shook hands with other worshippers, and tasted the wine and bread. Because I am illiterate in the Hawaiian language, I looked for the symbols and visual cues to follow the mass. But I understood anyway. Catholic mass since the Vatican Two has been converted from the Latin mass that many people no longer understood to the language of the local peoples. It previously was created in a time when the worshippers could be illiterate and still participate in prayer. The pictures, symbols, chants, music, and the sermons were meant to reach people of all walks of life. It did not matter that the language was foreign, the deep meanings and the commonalities were all translated into the minds of the masses.

Mass on Sundays occupies an hour or more, the same amount of time that a lecture does in many classrooms. But I wonder when does a true classroom satisfy all of our senses? Would we need to have a fiesta in our classroom every week to meet the tasting part? Do we need to stand up and do a salsa to liven up the lessons? Do we need to do group hugs to get our classes to be more cohesive? Or do we need videos and pictures all over our classrooms to maximize learning?

Sometimes I wonder if the answer is "yes" as I recall the nursery rhymes and the songs we learned in kindergarten. We did stand up and dance around the room, sing at the top of our voices, play with our classmates (and sometimes caught each others "cooties" and colds). We ate new things that our teachers made for us, and played music and painted and watched movies and Sesame Street. The days sped away for us although in our early childhood a day felt like a week and a half.

When first grade came, we were deprived of what had been offered in kindergarten. "Kindergarten is a transition to the rest of education," a teacher once explained to me when I asked why older children did not have as many fun activities as the kindergarteners, "The older children no longer need those activities and can concentrate better by reading and writing."

As a young teacher my heart dropped. I was saddened to know that schoolchildren and even older students in college would be deprived. It was only in language classes that we had our five senses satisfied. Sometimes we learned to dance, sing, play games, eat and smell ethnic food, hear music, see movies and pictures, and also learned to read and write. My senses were flooded by images of a different culture. As expected, I was an A student in these courses while in the regular course that were taught with a blackboard and a chalk, I was not as talented.

We are not all talented in reading and writing. Different cultures emphasize different disciplines. Some children grow up to be very athletic, some are good at commonsense things, others are artistic, and others are very social. Those are considered to be different facets of human intelligence. We all do not have to be book-learned to be smart and talented, for we all come with different gifts. As educators, it is our duty to accommodate the different types of intelligence in students, enhance their growth, and give credit to different types of talent. Learning styles differ greatly. Some children learn by play and by dancing. Some learn visually as many children of the 21^st century do by using computers, computer games, and other graphic media. Why then must education remain so stodgy and old-fashioned?

I once read to my great dismay that American education has not changed from the basic 400-year old pattern of learning: the teacher is at the head of the classroom, the students are in their seats at desks looking up at the blackboard, and these two main orientations formed the concept of school. Even as a kindergartener, I arranged my dolls and stuffed animals in small chairs and had imaginary desks and read to them and taught them as a "schoolteacher." Discipline was the golden word, and school was meant to be tolerated, and attending school was a duty as much as going to work (granted, this was in the 1960s).

Thus, when I tried innovative things on my own students as a college instructor, I received some shocked feedback. Some students who were my age or older and who were used to the traditional methods in teaching did not like the new methods. So, I promptly reduced the new ways and began to tone down some of my ideas. "What does she think she is?" a student wrote on one of my evaluations. "She thinks class time is time for fun. She needs to get more serious about her teaching."

I was saddened by the comment. Other students loved my lessons and wanted more, and yet that cutting comment was enough to discourage me from having fun in teaching. I put on a serious face and lectured in a monotone voice as much as possible although I was bubbling with enthusiasm on some of the topics. Animals were my passion and I would become a comic and a performer relating their antics. Films were my weekly requirements since multimedia for education was developed for the purpose of teaching by entertaining students. Learning could be and should be fun.

Alas, opposition will always occur when an educator wants to restructure a class and make it full of new methods and make it fun. "There seems to be no difference in test scores between students who learn in the traditional method as those who learn in the newer methods using multimedia," a report commented. Test scores reflect almost nothing of what goes on in a student's mind. What if he or she was thoroughly enjoying the experience of learning with multimedia, WebCT, and the Internet and vowed to become avid lifelong learner? What if the students with the high scores who learned in the traditional methods vowed to finish their degrees and to never go back to college for any reason?

I meet older students who comment that they are simply taking courses for "fun" since they have the leisure and the money. Others never stopped learning and are very eager. Those are the students who like my new hands-on learning methods, problem solving, websites, posted messages, videotapes, PowerPoint, slides, and photographs. These are essential to learning biology. In addition, I sometimes use mini skits, demonstrate concepts, and tell little tales that are both true and funny. I also share my life experiences and allow students to share theirs. We build websites and participate in posted messages. Perhaps there is less material being presented to students in the same amount of time while I am consumed in story-telling and in other activities, but I feel that the positive love for learning while catching the students' interest is a way to stimulate the senses.

The brain, which sometimes works on autopilot when one is reading or listening, will awaken to new stimulus. It's an established fact that we only use a fraction of our brainpower, but as children, we are forced to use much more of our small brains as we begin to develop, learn and survive in an adult world where we could be neglected, forgotten, or left behind. And as we play, taste, smell, see, speak, and hear, our brain is stimulated to grow.

As we grow older, it is as if we decide somehow that children, young adults, and even older adults do not need the same; we become sedentary in the ways we utilize our brains. This is not to say that we must jump around and shout from the top of the mountains. It is, however, essential for the health of our brain to keep it alert. People of old were able to do this in their daily lives as they interacted with one another, animals, and nature. They lived close to the Earth that gave birth to them. The flowers burst into bloom, overpowering the ancients with their colors, shapes, and their scents. The crops they grew responded to care as the domesticated animals did. As with all people living close to nature, they were confronted with danger, disaster, dilemmas, death, sickness, and all sorts of problems that required good problem-solving techniques, quick thinking, and a solid mental health. Working with their bodies allowed the brain to be nourished, and by singing, dancing, and playing music, the people of old developed that special part of their brain. They were artists, musicians, botanists, zoologists, doctors, nurses, midwives, craftsmen, caregivers, carpenter, engineers, and many other professionals without a college degree. They invented and created as much as we have in the 21^st century.

I wonder then if we have come a step backwards, exiling our youth to factory-like settings and allowing them to grow in a sterile greenhouse to produce college graduates who have not had the chance to play and have fun in the school environment. As I look around and see the educational tools, different methods of teaching and learning, and of course, distance education, I marvel at what we can do for our students. One day, I sat at the university discussing my ideas with the media coordinator for distance education. "We have so much out there," I began, "and WebCT, a learning tool that allows educators to upload images, assignments, have chat sessions, and give out quizzes and exams and e-mail students, is still being used like a blackboard in a traditional classroom." It still resembles a classroom with chat-rooms made for discussion. There are places for professors to post messages, assignments, and lecture notes. It is a valuable learning tool, and yet, it can be enhanced even more by techniques, which might flood our other senses.

I imagined music in the background, clips of old movies to accompany a lecture, enhancing PowerPoint slides, digital photos to show students, and time for a student to take a breather and get out of the seat and dance around before resuming class online. I wanted students to be creative. I liked the idea of websites, recording of music clips to share, and streaming video.

Certainly, someday there will be better tools to replace WebCT although it has its own merits and will retain its own place for educators. But I envisioned a classroom where students would work in teams, have active discussions, get up to create images, and share some time together outside of the classroom over some steaming mugs of coffee. I believe that in this way, we could learn a bit better, because there is pleasure in learning. If we were forced to sit for hours in a cold or stuffy classroom with inadequate ventilation in an uncomfortable chair, (sometimes with our stomachs growling) and learned while the professor wrote on the blackboard or on the whiteboard, the chalk or pen squeaking as the only auditory enhancement, we would all die of boredom. With 21^st technology, we can indeed enhance even traditional learning, and even online learning. There are merits to being able to read and write in silence, for that is where a lot of the thinking is going on, but the sparks motivation can be cultivated by a classroom filled with fun.

It is only when we break away from tradition that we can change the face of education. With the enhancements to tantalize our senses, we will be learning in joy, so that we will become lifelong learners, eager to sit in the classroom to actively share our thoughts and learn with all of our senses. Like in kindergarten, we will look forward to each day we spend in school.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

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