Will I really NEED algebra after school?

For those of us who create and teach mathematics, algebra is one of our much-used language skills.  We cannot imagine lives in which we do not write equations easily.  Thus inclined, we insist on the worth of algebra for students.   Taking an opposite view, here from Hanging Loose Press editor Robert Hershon  is an algebra-protest poem.  

Ghost stories in algebra -- Happy Halloween!

Born in Yugoslavia, Charles Simic emigrated at age 15 to Chicago; widely known and respected as a poet and teacher (at the University of New Hampshire), Simic served as US Poet Laureate during 2007-08.    This little poem is from The World Doesn't End (Mariner Books, 1989).

               Ghost Stories Written          by Charles Simic

Poetry and applied mathematics

Back in the 1980's when I began taking examples of poetry into my mathematics classrooms at Bloomsburg University, I think that I justified doing so by considering poetry as an application of mathematics.  For example, Linda Pastan applies algebra to give meaning to her poem of the same title.  Here are the opening lines.

Sense and Nonsense

     Nonsense verse has a prominent place in the poetry that mathematicians enjoy. Perhaps this is so because mathematical discovery itself has a playful aspect--playing, as it were, with non-sense in an effort to tease the sense out of it.      Lewis Carroll, author of  both mathematics and literature, often has his characters offer speeches that are a clever mix of sense and nonsense. For example, we have these two stanzas from "Fit the Fifth" of The Hunting of the Snark, the words of the Butcher, explaining to the Beaver why 2 + 1 = 3.

Poems of Calculus

In her thoughtful poem "Calculus" mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz writes of sharing with her students some of their subject's history--a drama enacted by two different sorts of mathematician.  Here are Glaz' opening lines: