"Poets," said Australian writer and teacher Erica Jolly, "find their themes in what matters to them." This quote is taken from Jennifer Strauss's introduction to Jolly's poetry collection, Making a Stand (Wakefield Press, 2015). Erica Jolly is a retired teacher of history and English in southern Australia and works tirelessly toward ending the segregation between STEM disciplines and the arts and humanities. In the lines below (taken from Making a Stand), Jolly is responding to words from former Chief Scientist Professor Ian Chubb who has said, speaking of mathematics, that he wants "all of us in the same tent."
Erica Jolly: If he does, we must remove segregation of students
into supposedly separate cultures of science and mathematics versus
the arts and humanities as well as the unwillingness for STEM
to make interdisciplinary connections.
Don't I as one of those deemed
inappropriate for that elite
have the right to access
their language?
to algebra, that Arabic word,
giving me letters in place
of apples or oranges to
solve problems
to know what binary means
and be aware of the way
two numbers -- one and
nought -- affect us all
to find in Alice in Wonderland
the work and words of that
lecturer in mathematics
Lewis Carroll,
to discover diagrams, diagonals
and the diameter of circles,
draw them with ruler,
pencil or compass
to learn about and not to fear
equations, recognize that
an equilateral triangle
has equal angles . . .
Jolly's poem continues for more than thirty stanzas. The complete poem is found in Making a Stand (Wakefield Press, 2015). More of Erica Jolly's political and poetical contributions can be discovered in this blog using this link to SEARCH results.
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