Embedding Maths in Poetry

This term I'm doing a teaching course at my local FE college. It's been very interesting so far, and because it's not subject-specific, I've met people who are teaching or training in widely differing subjects - Hairdressing, Health and Safety, Catering, Safeguarding, Personal Training and many others. In one of our assignments, we had to give examples of we would embed 'functional skills' into our own subject area.

Functional skills are English, Maths and ICT - and apparently we're pretty bad at them in the UK, so the Government wants teachers to take every opportunity they can to give learners the opportunity to use them. And - here's the rub - 'embedding' means the students don't notice you're doing it!

So, how on earth do I embed Maths in Creative Writing? After a lot of head scratching (and asking fellow poets for ideas) I came up with the following:

• Discussing word and syllable counts - simple, but counting is a maths skill
• Multiplying stanza length and number of stanzas to ascertain a desired line count
• Using Dadaist  and OULIPO  techniques to generate poems and discussion on probability and mathematical generation of material
• Discussion of the influence on poetry of Fibonnacci and the Golden Ratio
• Talking about probabilities and percentages in relation to the chances of getting published!

I'm sure there are many more, but it took me quite a while to get even these. But after I'd handed in my assignment, I remembered that the title of this blog comes from relating poetry to maths - you can read about it in my very first post, here. It turns out I've been embedding maths in my own musings about poetry for quite a while...

"Mandel zoom 00 mandelbrot set". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.