Links to poems and songs with STEM themes

     During April 2017, Indiana State Poet Laureate Shari Wagner teamed with Indiana Humanities to feature the work of Hoosier poets to celebrate April as National Poetry Month.  This humanities website posts a poem each day and in honor of  Quantum Leap -- a Humanities program focused on bringing together STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and the Humanities - the poem featured each Monday in April had a STEM-related theme.

Sustainability needs the arts AND mathematics . . .

The following poem is by Erica Jolly -- an Australian poet and retired teacher who is working hard to have the arts and the sciences integrated in Australian schools curricula.  “For too long, since the 1950s, we have witnessed serious losses across disciplines as science and mathematics have been deliberately separated from the arts and humanities,” Ms Jolly says.

"What has sustainability got to do with mathematics?"    by Erica Jolly

An exclamation attacking interdisciplinary themes in the national curriculum 

by Christopher Pyne on Q & A, 28 October 2013.

Does he not know or care
humankind must measure? 

The magic of mathematics (in art)

     Australian teacher and  poet Erica Jolly is convinced that breaking down the barriers that make silos of sciences and humanities subjects will promote better education systems and improve job prospects for students.  She brings mathematics into this engaging poem found in Holding Patterns, an online book of physics and engineering poems, part of the "Science Made Marvelous" project.

Sculpture at Questacon (Australia National Science and Technology Center)      

                                                                                by Erica Jolly

     It looks like magic --
     children are turning
     a great stone sphere
     this way and that
     smoothly, easily.  

A subtraction problem

Let's solve this subtraction problem:

                    Women do the job
            minus   the recognition.    
                           ____________________________

      The "found poem" above is from a headline for an article by Petula Dvorak in the Washington Post on 21 August 2015.  Dvorak's full headline was a bit longer, "Women do the job minus the training and recognition."  (Indeed Dvorak's article portrays the military as an even more difficult environment for women than the STEM fields.)
       Also found in the Post (this past weekend) an enthusiastic review by Marcia Bartusiak of Eileen Pollack's The Only Woman In the Room:  Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club.  Another problem to solve!!!

Include Arts in STEM -- and have STEAM !

Welcome to this blog where we support STEAM !

Visit YouTube for

 math-student, performance-poet Harry Baker's 

"A love poem for lonely prime numbers"

A bit more about Harry Baker can be found in this May 23, 2014 posting. 
In May 2015 visit Takoma Park Community Center Galleries for a STEAM exhibit organized by visual artist and poetry-lover Shanthi Chandrasekar.

Girls who like math

Often I think about the interactions of girls with mathematics and recently I have been feeling delighted that all of my school-age granddaughters like math. In fact, Harvey Mudd mathematician Rachel Levy has included views from these girls (and from me) here in her blog, "Grandma Got STEM."

T h i s
g i r l
d o e s
m a t h

S u m
f o r
f u n
 

s o
 i f 

1

To read selections from several of my favorite poems about girls-in-math (including Sharon Olds' poem "The One Girl at the Boys' Party" and Kyoko Mori's poem, "Barbie Says Math is Hard") follow this link to a posting made on 10 June 2010.  Another math-girls post was back on  26 December 2010.  Or use the SEARCH box (upper right) to find poems related to your own choice of topics.

Grandma Got STEM

     It was my good fortune last weekend to meet the sister-in-law of one of my neighbors, mathematician and Harvey Mudd professor, Rachel Levy.  Levy is also a blogger and her postings in Grandma Got STEM tell of achievements of women in science.
     I have looked for a poem to pair with my mention here of  Grandma Got STEM.  Although the following poem by Tami Haaland (found at the Poetry Foundation website) is not mathematical, it nicely brings to life a relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter -- and we wish for both of them "places to explore beyond the frame."

       Little Girl     by Tami Haaland

       She’s with Grandma in front
       of Grandma’s house, backed
       by a willow tree, gladiola and roses.

       Who did she ever want
       to please? But Grandma
       seems half-pleased and annoyed.

Grandma got STEM

     There are so many fine websites to visit and blogs to read that it is hard to get to them all. One of my recent pleasures has been Grandma Got STEM (STEM  = Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), orchestrated by Rachel Levy, Harvey Mudd College, Mathematics.  Recent entries there that I've enjoyed are Martha Siegel (Towson University, Mathematics) and Carol Jo Crannell (mother of Annalisa Crannell, Franklin and Marshall College, Mathematics and Art).
     For a while I wondered how I might link these STEM pioneers to poetry and this morning was delighted to discover in a bio of poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge that her Chinese mother was a mathematician.  And these initial stanzas of Berssenbrugge's poem "Tan Tien" illustrate her familiarity with mathematical vocabulary.