The goal of this assignment was not to craft lasting works of art, but rather to give my students an alternative discourse in which they could explore mathematical
ideas. It is my belief that poetry may offer math students new means to explore the
recondite realm of abstract mathematical concepts. The purpose of the present article is to demonstrate the role poetry can play in improving cognitive understanding and confidence in mathematics students, and to offer my own students’ responses to and reflections on the aforementioned assignment as evidence for poetry’s successful portrayal of that role. (More information on the assignment and the questionnaire used to obtain students’ thoughts on the assignment can be found in the appendices.)
(Dear Reader: We skip ahead now)
Why Poetry?
I claim that poetry can be made to serve two important purposes in an introductory
mathematics course: (1) poetry offers a new sort of cognition, a new lens, one based in linguistic metaphor, through which students can examine and re-examine mathematical ideas; and (2) writing poetry emboldens students and gives them confidence by allowing them a more familiar idiom in which they can express themselves mathematically. I will continue now with a brief description of the assignment as it was given to students in my Fall 2008 Precalculus course. (The full text of this assignment’s prompt is contained in the second appendix; the Fall 2007 assignment in my Calculus I course was very similar.) I will then share several students’ poems and reflections on their poems, indicating how their work shows evidence of improved mathematical cognition and bolstered confidence in performing math.
The Assignment
The assignment was a straightforward one: students were asked to write a single poem each, and each poem was to involve mathematics in some fashion, whether as an element in the poem’s structural design or as the basis for the poem’s content. For students who had difficulty conceiving of a meaningful matching of math and poetry, I offered several resources on math poetry as models. Given the diversity of
forms and functions and my students’ varying degrees of exposure to poetry, I expected that my students were liable to craft a broad assortment of poems differing from one another in length, structure, content, and form as much as night differs from day.
(I was not disappointed.)
Students were asked to submit rough drafts of their poetry, which I would then
review myself before offering feedback. As I am not a trained poet, my responses to
students’ work generally de-emphasized technical elements such as scansion and meter and focused on encouraging students to choose language and structure that most clearly expressed the meaning they were attempting to convey in their poems. This meant that many of my comments to the students comprised statements like “I sense that you’re aiming for an angry tone in this poem; are the words you’ve chosen those that will best convey anger?”
Having received their commented drafts from me, students then had a day or two
to revise their work before taking part in a poetry reading/workshop with their peers.
This event, held outside of class, was not compulsory, and only four or five students
chose to attend. Those who did attend shared their poetry with one another and offered each other feedback on their work
Students submitted their final drafts two weeks after the assignment was first
handed out. The assignment was a graded one, but in order to keep the stakes low and to nurture a safe environment in which students could feel free to explore, students were graded only on whether or not they completed each stage of the assignment.
(Dear Reader: We leave you to explore the rest of the WAC Journal article, November 2009, Vol. 20, including examples of the students' poetry: http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol20/bahls.pdf )
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