May 9, 2014 Teaching and Learning
Test
(A Glimpse From My Classroom Window
While Students Take a State Math Exam)
©May 9th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
Trees, a brick wall
Fighting a grey sky.
Glass windows reflect
And reflect back
Human and non-human images,
Fleeting and busy, still and silent,
Over-layered, screen upon screen
While cars flow by,
An easy stream, swift and sure,
On a road where sound
May or may not exist.
Not in my quiet classroom, anyway –
Here, where heads are bent
Over official papers
Lives the Mind,
Where only the rustle of papers,
And the scratch of pencils,
And the shuffle of abstracted
Student feet reveal a Supreme Force –
Thought, turned into abstract
Abstruse, enigmatic
Symbol, a language not
Everyone masters, but which
Life and Matter know.
Cellular and atomic
Is their knowledge.
And the Laws were
Already written, before
My students and I
Before everyone,
And everything,
Everywhere, everywhen,
Ever were.
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Tags: #Original Poetry, atomic and cellular, classroom moments, exams, Laws, mathematics, Students, teacher, universal laws
Feb 10, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
I am fascinated by angles and curves. (Why was the realm of mathematics such a closed book to me when I was an eighth-grader, bored and maddened by all things mathematical made mundane by well-meaning, but muttering teachers?)
Pythagoras’ theorem and the puzzle of Pi (can’t get the symbol on this thing) enchanted me, always. I understood both, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how those Greek cats got to both core understandings.
Then, I come downstairs to re-heat some coffee and cudgel my brain into some semblance of alertness, and what do I see on the dining table? A book on mathematical reasoning left there by my husband, with a page opened to my very favorite topics in geometry!
It really is all about squaring the circle — so magical!
Somewhere out there is a perfect place, a folded space that contains every shape and non-shape, every number and non-number, every sound and all silence, every color and non-color.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Circle. In ever-widening circles, we swim upwards towards a blind understanding of our earth-bound selves. And we reach for the radius that will spin us around our galactic core, and we hold on desperately, inching towards that still point, the centre of it all.
Ah, that was one good cup of coffee! Smack!
Tags: #Poetry, coffee, folded space, mathematics, pythagoras, squaring the circle