Voices in a Geometry Classroom

I have been invited to return next week (October 20 at 7 PM) to Bloomsburg University, where I taught mathematics for lots of years, for a poetry reading.  Preparation for the reading (which celebrates my new book, Red Has No Reason) drew my thinking back to my teaching days at Bloom and to "Geometry Demonstration," a poem about the arguments in my head as I faced a particularly challenging class of geometry students.  Here it is.

   Geometry Demonstration       by JoAnne Growney

   Yesterday, some visitors
   interrupted geometry class --
   angry voices raged around the room,
   unwilling to stay caged within my head
   while I spoke enthusiastically
   of axioms of incidence,
   placements of parallels,
   numbers of degrees
   in the angles of rectangles.

          Wake up. This is not difficult --
          no hungry mouths to feed, no
          bleeding wounds to heal. Adopt
          a polygonal attitude. Examine
          an assumption. Abandon the postulate
          that says, don't ever question.
          You were not born knowing.
          Your mind won't get dirty
          on a tangent of hyperbolic thought.

          Open up.
          Let one eye watch
          the parallels
          that meet.
          Shift to a point
          of perspectivity.
          Draw those lines
          that cross
          at your heart.

   My students ignored these stirring voices,
   so I dismissed them and went on--
   rightly coaxing obtuse angles
   to square up
   and respond.

This poem was first published in 1996 in The College Mathematics Journal with the title "Geometry Class."  This and other math-related poems may be found at my website.