Guest speaker and poet Deanna Young came into our class a few weeks ago, but I'm just now getting around to posting this. I'll admit that I'm not a huge fan of poetry; I find poetry to be hard to access, too full of imagery and too short to be fulfilling. But Deanna challenged us to think about how poetry can be used across the curriculum to promote student growth. She gave us ten minutes to write our own poem, and included several criteria as guidance:
- the title had to be either "The beauty of math is..." or "The problem with math is..."
- we couldn't include any numbers or figures
- the poem had to be 11 lines long
- we had to include at least one emotion
- we had to include at least two colors
I was so struck by this assignment and by the work I created that I saved my poem that was written on the back of a scrap sheet of paper. Alas, in the shuffle of the past few weeks I can no longer find it, but I'll do my best to recreate it here.
At the time, I was at the tail end of an absolutely beautiful pregnancy that had been somewhat marred by over-cautious doctors: the baby was measuring small and while all of our tests came back reassuringly positive they insisted on monitoring me very closely and moving me into the "at risk" category, which only stressed me out further. I left every weekly checkup in tears.
The problem with math is
that statistics don't have feelings.
They can't say
whether my baby will be
happy or sad;
brown or white—
so don't measure me
against a bell curve
or worry me unnecessarily,
because the life inside me
is just perfect.
