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Rhyme and reason – why a university professor uses poetry to teach math

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Title of course:

The Ways Math and Poetry Can Open Your Eyes to the World

What prompted the idea for the course?

I have always enjoyed writing poetry. As a high school mathematics teacher, I recall telling my students that everything is and can be connected to math, even creative writing. Then, as a graduate student, I read about people using “I am” poem templates for young people to express who they are through a series of “I am” statements, and I thought to myself, where is the “I am” math poem template? So I created one.

I then started working on what I call problem-posing poetry, which are poems connected to a social issue and that can be used as alternatives to traditional math word problems. Working with Yousef Kara, who is a poet studying to become a teacher, we learned to see poetry as a way to understand the real world before connecting to math learning. We also began to use poetry to reflect on prior math learning. After using math poetry with high schoolers and teachers, it became apparent it should be a part of my math methods courses for future teachers.

What does the course explore?

The course explores the idea of poetry as a rich experience before, during and after math learning connected to real-world issues.

The “I am” math poem template is an example of poetry before math. The prompts used in the template allow the teacher to incorporate students’ interests when learning math in the future. For example, the last prompt shows what students are passionate about, and teachers should use that interest in their teaching of math.

Problem-posing poems like “Number Sense,” written by Ricardo Martinez, show how a poem can use actual data to become a math problem for students to solve. Poetry after math learning can best be captured by Yousef’s poem “The Wrong Bathroom, Continuously,” a reflection on trans identity related to functions that model relationships between two quantities.

This poem demonstrates concepts of math through exploring different types of continuous functions in calculus. Functions that oscillate, approach opposite infinities and disjointed functions, all of which make it impossible to find the exact value of a limit. Hence the line, “You cannot pin me down to a single point.”

Here is an excerpt from the poem:

I am a continuous function.

I oscillate My gender, in constant motion, And I don’t care if I am unrecognizable to you

I approach both infinities From the left and the right Expanding with each self discovery. Expanding far beyond your comprehension

I am disjointed Deconstructed and decolonized. I teleport between and beyond genders You cannot pin me down to a single point

It shows how learning more about math expands our vocabulary and understanding of what we experience.

Why is this course relevant now?

The beauty of using poetry is that it makes math more exciting and allows it to connect to any topic or idea. Math poetry becomes even more critical today as people need an outlet to communicate their truths about societal injustices like trans people’s rights, bans on Black history or Islamophobia. Math and poetry create new metaphors that allow people to better understand societal issues along with themselves and others.

What’s a critical lesson from the course?

A key takeaway from the course is that math is a vital part of each person, and poetry can help people see that math is all around us.

What will the course prepare students to do?

By exploring math and poetry, I believe they, as aspiring teachers, will begin to question how they were taught – for example, the use of timed tests and learning with no real-world connections. A lot of people say they don’t like math, when, in truth, they have never knowingly experienced math connected to their culture, values, desires and dreams. Math and poetry work to reclaim how we all see, experience and live with math every day.

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Ricardo Martinez, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education, Penn State

This article originally appeared in The Conversation under a Creative Commons License

Feature Image by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels

the house where sivvy died

Sivvy Once Unthought Humanity: A Poem by Coby Hobbs

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(Caused by Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°”)

 

Pulse, Plurality, 

Precarious spleen 

Rupture with gentility.

 

Hell is here now,

Licking at the future, dull, intricate, 

Wheezing about every unthought.

 

The computers. The computers. 

So clean

The indelible brain. 

 

Stop moving under carbon. 

The high smoke tolls. 

Almost familiar?— from Nietzche’s tongue 

 

The eternal return. 

Waterwheel trundles by torrents of kisses and love, 

Love, love. 

 

The weak, the lechers 

All drink the same water that cools the robots’ lectures.

Fuse blubber and data. 

 

Make unthought. 

Find the unthought!

⸻

 

Still, 

I am purified by resting underneath man. 

Not men the things, but man himself. 

 

There, I am the world.

The moon,

Exchanging glances at the sun

 

Like the fleeting senses that make up everything. 

If I could reverse gaze

I would burn it all.

 

Save the tinder cries of virgins 

And that yellow sullen smoke 

Would perfume the space around all matter,

 

Energy—

Without skin and meat, it costs nothing.

But, that place is the same

 

Don’t you see!

A growing huge white camellia.

Antithesis of alloy 

 

And pure acetylene.

Attended by something

More than wetware. 

 

To Paradise is roaming around neath 

The trees, the hues, the thoughts, the covers

Not with dancing by programmed cherubim.

 

“Owl’s talons clenched” your unthinking heart 

You then boastfully put your head 

In the oven. 

 

 

^^^

Coby Hobbs is an Audere contributor and editor.

Rose Front Cover Only

Cover Art Review: Kelly Airo on Bloomsbury’s Late Rose

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Editor’s Note: on September 1, 2019, Chickadee Prince Books will publish Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, a novel by Pen Pearson about the often-overlooked Edwardian poet, Charlotte Mew. For this cover, like several others, we used San Francisco artist, Kelly Airo. Here, Kelly talks about the cover, how she created the art, and what artists inspired her. It is available for pre-order in paperback from your favorite local independent bookstore, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and on Kindle.

Kelly Airo: For this illustration/portrait I mostly wanted to capture Charlotte Mew as the independent, artistic woman she was. I wanted the portrait to show Charlotte as a complex and intelligent person. To me the painting was more about capturing her character rather than an exact likeness, as there aren’t a lot of photos of her for reference.

As for the style of the painting, I drew inspiration from the illustrators of Mew’s era like Elizabeth Shippen Green and Charles Dana Gibson. My intention was to make a book cover that would draw in the modern reader, but wouldn’t have looked all that out of place in the time of Charlotte and Anne Mew.

To a Forgotten Poet

To a Forgotten Poet

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As we approach the publication of Pen Pearson’s acclaimed new novel, Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, which dramatizes the life of the Edwardian poet, Charlotte Mew, we continue to celebrate Mew’s poetry, Pearson’s poetry, with a few others tossed in for some perspective.

Today, in addition to Mew and Pearson, we take a look back at Julian M. Drachman, a poet whose works appeared in The Nation, among many others, and who died in 1983. You can see more poetry by Charlotte Mew on the Chickadee Prince website. You pre-purchase Pearson’s novel about Mew on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any bookstore in America.

Fin de fete is by Mew; Winter’s Sparrows is by Pearson; and To a Forgotten Poet is by Drachman. Photograph by J.R. Korpa/Unsplash.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BeFunky-photo

This Fire: Poetry by Pen Pearson, Stuart Witt and Charlotte Mew

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Remember when every newspaper and magazine published poetry? Let’s get poetry out of its corner, and back into our daily life. Anyway, we’re giving it a try.

Stuart Witt is a poet and retired math teacher. Charlotte Mew was a great but little-known English poet of the late 19th century. Pen Pearson teaches writing and literature at Northern State University and is the author of Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, a novel about Charlotte Mew, which Chickadee Prince Books will publish in Fall 2019.

 

 

This Fire (by Pen Pearson)

 

She says, I’m just a firefighter working for the U.S. Forest Service.

She says, I’m just a woman trying to make a living doing her job.

She says, I’m just a person who’s got her co-workers’ backs when fire rages.

 

I’ll tell you about other women like her.

 

They wake naked on sheet-less beds, disoriented and ashamed.

They wake with bruises on their bodies, tattoos on their minds.

 

If they report the abuse, they’re demoted and threatened.

They’re told: Don’t be “one of those girls,” which they know means “bitch.”

 

What happens to their drinking buddies, their peerless firefighters

who say, If women can’t take the heat, they should go back to the kitchen?

 

They must think it’s a man’s job we’re trying to do.

 

We say:

 

Why grope our breasts and crotches, call us names and harass us?

Why not prove we can’t do the job based on the job, not our sex?

 

Don’t write QUIT in the soot on our cars when we file a report.

Don’t leave pornography in the driver’s seat for us to find.

Don’t call us “one of those girls,” which we know means “ballbreaker.”

 

Even now, smell kindling catch fire. Hear the flames’ whispers

transmogrify to rattled breath, witches cackling over spoils.

Feel the fire’s heart rage out of control, explode with fury.

 

See flames tower above skyscraping redwoods and blackening smoke

lay down on and strangle the air. Sense oxygen emptying your lungs,

your own life give birth to an anonymous, amorphous monster

 

whose tyrannical power sears you. Know we’re here to fight fire with water,

with dust, with fire itself, and with our comrades, women and men,

an armed front attacking this wall with ungloved hands, mouths uncovered.

 

We’re here to fight fire with words, with our words against his words

when necessary. We’re here to walk through the fire’s center and come out alive—

fierce shoots of cedar saplings engendered by this fire’s ash.

Design by Steven S. Drachman from an image by Alexas Fotos/Pixabay