A friend of mine, who is a math teacher, looked completely horrified when I told her about my class this semester. She told me a semester of poetry at any level, much less the graduate level, was her version of hell. I replied that a semester of a math class was mine. Though we laughed about it, I got to thinking. What could English teachers do differently with poetry to appeal to students whose first inclination is not towards writing or reading poetry? How can we incorporate other talents in the classroom?
After all, poetry can be mathematical. There are certain counts and beats. There's parallelism and dealing with the unknown (the "imaginary" number). Sentences can be like equations. My curiosity led to some interesting research on the correlations between math and poetry. I was amazed by what I found.
For example, I had no idea that the iambic pentameter in Shakespearean sonnets
* mimics the rhythm of the human heartbeat
*can be converted into the binary digits 01 01 01
* and these binary digits are the basis for computer programming
If these connections exist just within Shakespeare's sonnets, I wonder what other connections exist. If teachers can find these connections, and work with one another to bring them into a cross-curricular classroom, we could teach our students so much more than we ever thought.
Laura,
ReplyDeleteI never realized it but your point about poetry as a mimicry of the human heart and binary code is spot on. One point of association that has always worked well for me is music. What I mean by this is: try to break down a piece of music into individual parts....a series of beats makes a measure which constitutes a bar which in turn leads to the formation of a song as a whole. My point being: that even though music and poetry are highly complex in their own ways...they are both built upon simple blocks.
Maybe try it with nursery rhymes to illustrate this process? Maybe your students in band, orchestra etc. can find a through-line here?
mathematics and music are the perfect background for a poet. Try offering poems that rely heavily on sound texture and rhythmic precision. Just off the top of my head, look at Plath's "Daddy" or Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Hughes's "The Weary Blues." Lots of them!
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