Poetry, Science & Math, OR why I love the web

by | Tuesday, January 12, 2010

A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge!  How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on…

I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing poems on science (Scientific Poems or Sci-Po’s for short). It all started with an extra-credit assignment she needed to do for her science class, and a need, I perceived, to keep her blog (Uniquely Mine) up-to-date. She has quite a few written now. For instance here is one about a news item about scientists finding dinosaur eggs (and other dino-stuff) in India (Cluster of dinosaur eggs found in southern India), and here’s the poem:

Dino eggs found in India

Archeologists in India, blinked
When they saw things that they thought were extinct
In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu
They found dino eggs, bones, and guess what, they found dino poo!

Independently of this, Sean Nash (of Nashworld) wrote a post (actually a mini-rant) about some mathematics related poetry he had found in Mother Goose (Read his complete post here: But Math is hard.) He was complaining in part about this poem (see below) and the negative feelings it could generate in his kids (and others too) about mathematics.

I wrote a comment on his blog describing Shreya’s Sci-Po project and Sean and I went back and forth a bit on his comments page, and that, as far as I was concerned, was that. Shreya wrote a few more Sci-Po’s, Sean went on with his life, till yesterday I received a note from Sean about a math blogger who had taken the idea of Sci-Po’s seriously and in a new direction.

“Math Mama writes” is a blog by Sue VanHattum, a community college math teacher interested in all levels of math learning, and the mama of a young son. She had a new post yesterday where she mentions Sean’s original posting and my comment on his blog. Building on my daughter’s Sci-Po’s she sets up a challenge for her readers, in essence to write Math-Po’s! She asks her readers, “to write a little kids’ poem …  that tells of the beauty of math, or, that mentions math and challenge, both in a positive way.” One reader has already taken her up on the challenge and I am sure there will be more to come.

In a post written many months ago (Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined) I had described David Weinberger’s idea of the web as being small pieces loosely connected. These small pieces are there because someone took the time to put it out there, because they care about it deeply and passionately. I had written:

This idea of people putting things out there, not because they seek to make money but rather because they want to share their knowledge, their skills, their interests, and that what they put out there is immediately and widely accessible is what makes the web so interesting.

How cool is this entire sequence of events and the manner in which the openness of the web allows for such sharing of ideas and resources. This way a parent’s rant about Mother Goose, connects with a 5th grader’s blog and leads a number of people to write some cool poetry on mathematics! What an interesting and fascinating world we live in.

Image credit:  Iconfinder & Iconspedia

A few randomly selected blog posts…

New Orleans (photos)

I took a couple of hours off to walk around New Orleans in the French Quarters taking pictures. Here they are... Click on the image for more pictures...

I can resist everything except temptation (or marshmallows)

Have you heard of the marshmallow experiment? It is a pretty famous experiment conducted at Stanford back in the 60's. Walter Mischel a psychologist conducted this experiment on four-year olds in which the children were given one marshmallow and promised a second...

Yet another periodic table…

The ongoing saga of mis-representing the periodic table for any darned list of objects continues... Here is a new one sent in by my friend and colleague Patrick Dickson: A periodic table of Typefaces. Now I won't beat a dead horse here, (Nashworld has a great posting...

Good Evil Ambigram

Brad Honeycutt, a fellow Spartan (he graduated 1996 a couple of years before I started here at Michigan State) is fascinated by optical illusions. He has completed a couple of books on optical illusions the first of which will be coming out in July. Scott Kim, one of...

TPACK Newsletter #41, May 2019

TPACK Newsletter #41, May 2019

Here is the latest pdf version of the TPACK Newsletter (#41, May 2019), as curated and shared by Judi Harris and her team. (Previous issues are archived here.) This issue includes 59 articles, 4 book chapters, and 20 dissertations that have not appeared...

Happy 2013!

Our family has a Christmas-break tradition. Over the past 5 years or so, every winter-break, we work together a create a video new-year's card. And of course, we made one this year as well. As you can imagine, coming up with original ideas has become increasingly...

Synthesis: A creative cognitive tool (2 articles)

Over the past couple of years my research team (the Deep-Play Research group) and I have been writing an on-going series of articles  about rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century. Published in the journal TechTrends, these articles have been great...

Paradoxes & Ambigrams: Article 2 of 2

A few months ago I had posted about publication of the first of two articles on mathematics, visual wordplay and paradoxes. The second article (part of our series on Art and Math co-authored with my friend Gaurav Bhatnagar and published by At Right Angles) is now...

Ed Psych in a digitally networked world

Figure/Ground ambigram for Educational Psychology by Punya Mishra It has been a while coming, but finally the 3rd Edition of the Handbook of Educational Psychology is finally here. We have a chapter in it about the manner in which digital and networking technologies...

4 Comments

  1. Sacha Shawcroft

    Wow! This is pretty sweet posts, I kind of agree so I am still enjoying this.

    Reply
  2. Punya Mishra

    I love it. I have to show your students’ poems to Shreya. She’ll get a kick out of it. ~ punya

    Reply
  3. laptops

    i think we all love the web… there are so many reasons that i could write,so i`ll just write just one : INFORMATION ! on the web these days you can find everything from nail to airplanes and moon landings,i guess you know what i mean ,greetings

    Reply

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