Writing Mathematical Poetry.

 

Every so often, the administration gets the idea that we need to do some sort of cross curricular activity.  When I see the edict, I pull out my poetry writing activity and have the students do it once they get the "This isn't English" comments out of their system.  Sometimes, students come up with some really good ones and other times they struggle due to their language abilities.

In addition since April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, it has been dubbed Math Poetry Month. You can also have students write math poems in April.

A mathematical poem is a poem using vocabulary, definitions, formulas, and concepts to describe mathematical things.  It might be about one of the operations, the math that describes something in nature such as a snail shell, or statistics used for basketball or baseball players.  

Writing a mathematical poem requires the poet follow a few steps and at the end, they will have a poem.  The first thing is to choose the topic and narrow down the topic to something narrow.  For instance, New Year is too broad a subject but if it is narrowed to the dropping of the ball in Times Square, that is doable.

The second thing is to look at mathematical vocabulary associated with the topic.  The idea is to list all the terms you can find on that topic so you have lots of choices.  It might require a trip to the internet, the textbook, or even asking others.  If I did a poem on the Times Square ball, I'd want to look up facts about it before I start looking at mathematical vocabulary so I know what to look for.

There are several different poetry forms that can be used.  A student might want to choose to use a haiku form with three lines, where the first and third lines are composed of five syllables and the middle line has seven.   They might prefer using rhyming couplets, stanzas, sonnets or a longer poem with no set structure.  On the other hand, they might look at mathematically based structures such as diamanté which is a diamond shaped poem composed of seven lines so the lines are one, two, three, four, three, two, one word(s) or a Fib poem whose lines with the number of syllables math the Fibonacci sequence.  Line one has one syllable, line two has one syllable, line three has two syllables, line four has three syllables and so on.

Once the first draft is written, students can go through the process of rewriting to make it better.  They might need to rearrange words, shift out vocabulary for better choices, or check spelling until it is just right. 

Many times when introducing the topic of mathematical poetry, students need to see examples.  The American Mathematical Society (AMS) has a yearly competition and they share the top three winning entries.  Share a few of the winning poems with your students to give them an idea of what it looks like. The Smithsonian Magazine also provides some nice examples written by a variety of people including a former U.S. Poet Laureate.  

The nice thing, is that this activity can be done in elementary, middle school, or high school. So when April comes around or your admin tells you that you must do writing, expose the students to this activity.  Let me know what you think, let me know.  Have a great day.