If Whales Can Sing, So Can We !

These days, one of the saddest things for local teachers, is they no longer have the time to teach creatively using materials they’ve developed and tailored for specific subject areas, as well as for the various learning styles of the children they serve in their classrooms.  Instead, they have a rigid schedule to which they must adhere, so as not to fall behind in that ever important task of year-end test preparation.

The era in which I was taught the craft of teaching, stressed education and development of the “whole child.”  And what we did each day was based on an honest attempt to give them skills for an entire lifetime.  These days it seems too many kids are being treated as “heads on a stick.” The short-term goal is packing their brains with information which is known to be on the statewide tests, then drilling them day after day until they become numb and just want the whole “learning” thing to end.  Of course, there is no long-term goal in this scenario, that is, other than perpetuating the myth in the public’s view, that good scores are always synonymous with a good education.

 Now, this post is NOT meant to be an in-depth discussion of how education of young kids has gone down the crapper.  If it was, I’d probably get comments from irate parents who couldn’t care one whit if their kids are being taught to THINK AND  PROBLEM SOLVE, as long as those test scores are looking good.  Let’s face it, there’s no real way to measure the benefit of things like art, music, discussion, and critical thinking in the classroom.  Maybe if there was,  and a quantitative score could  be compiled, such parents might cut old schoolers like me some slack, and wouldn’t see us as so cranky and out of touch.

The REAL purpose of this post, then, is to briefly contrast how radically classroom instruction is changing.  Recently I found a song I wrote in 1999, to use in my Second Grade classroom as a final review of the information we had gleaned in a science unit on “Whales.”  As I began collecting the information that might find its way to the final quiz, I thought the kids might enjoy singing this song each day while reviewing for the test as they sang. There were at least twenty-five “mentions” of things embedded in the song’s verses, that actually ended up on the unit final, either whale vocabulary, life-cycle facts, or geographic references that every smart whale would need to know.

Just for perspective, the way local primary kids would learn about whales THESE days, is to read a half dozen pages about them in the state sanctioned science book, then complete a similar number of “fill in the blank” pages in its companion workbook.  Little more would be added by the teacher, lest he or she veer off schedule and fall behind the district mandated timeline.  And, since “singing” is not important in the current  curriculum, use of my whale song might be considered an almost treasonous waste of classroom time.

Anyway, for all you “modern” educators and testing specialists out there… sure, I have NO PROOF that reviewing for a quiz by singing a silly song I wrote, made a statistical difference.  All I know is, the kids passed their unit quiz with flying colors.  Of course, it could have been because of my superlative teaching :), or the great notes we took, or the excellent books we read and video’s we watched.  Or maybe it was the drawings and diagrams we made, or the notebooks and picture files we compiled, or the art projects we crafted about all aspects of a whale’s life.

Maybe it was the tapes we heard of whales “singing,” or the whale artifacts we made into a classroom display and actually touched with our own hands.  Or it might have been all that whale math we did, computing and comparing their weights, and figuring out the mileage between locations on their migratory trek.  Perhaps it was because we collected money and adopted a real  humpback named, “Lightning,” and followed his “sightings” in at least two of the world’s oceans.  Yeah, come to think of it, that dumb ass whale song probably didn’t make one bit of real difference when everything is said and done. Oh, well… at least it had a catchy tune, and was great fun to sing!

(A Paisano Postulate:  The Creator thought it important enough to equip us with five senses.  It seems reasonable, then, that the more of these senses children use as they learn, the wider and deeper that learning will become, the clearer and more interestingly subject matter will unfold, and the more relevant and permanent their knowledge will be.  And, if education is truly about LIFE preparation, it should equip boys and girls to deal with the complexities they will certainly face when they become adults, not simply make them good test takers.)

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If you’d like to hear the song and learn a little about whales yourself, click HERE.  Thanks to Lo-Fi for “cleaning up” the original cassette recording, and showing me how to link it to this blog.