January 17, 2013

It's dark out, too dark to see more than the ghostly shape of the crepe myrtle tree outside my window, a pale reflection from the light of this room spilling out. The wind has moved on and it is silent and still. I can feel the cold creeping in from the glass, one of the drawbacks of lovely big windows. I got our little space heater and put it on a chair beside my desk, it makes a soft whirring as it moves some warm air around but still I find myself shivering occasionally. I am such a wuss when it comes to cold, that I am glad I live where I do, that heat is mostly what we have, and that the cold is only a short term thing. The truck that brings the paper every morning when around the corner, its characteristic throbbing engine revving up down the road past the curve, its taillights like twin red comets through the dark. Yesterday on my way home from the market, I noticed most of the trees have lost all their leaves now, except for some of the little tallow trees that are still holding on to those deep maroon leaves they sometimes have. 

One of my students was drawing an odd tree for one of her cards, when I asked her to tell me about it, she said it was a binary tree, that she had to look up binary tree for math and once she did, she decided to draw one. Her tree had a trunk that went straight then divided into two big branches, each of which divided into two, and so on until the branches got really small. She put the occasional leaf on a branch but mostly they were bare. I told her I would have to look up what a binary tree was as well. And I did, it's a diagram where every node has at most two choices, or at least that's what I got from the explanation. And I realized, after learning this, that her tree was a pretty good representation of the concept as well as an interesting . . . tree! I like how kids make such connections, she took something from her math class, something that appealed to her and made it into her art. This is why I love doing these classes, to see just that kind of thing! Looking for a poem this morning, I found one that seemed to do the same thing, make some really odd connections. It made me laugh! 

To David, About his Education 

The world is full of mostly invisible things,

And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,

Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,

Things like the square root of Everest

Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,

Or whether the law of the excluded middle

Applies west of the Rockies. For these

And the like reasons, you have to go to school

And study books and listen to what you are told,

And sometimes try to remember. Though I don’t know

What you will do with the mean annual rainfall

On Plato’s Republic, or the calorie content

Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be

Good for you, and you will have to learn them

In order to become one of the grown-ups

Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,

But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world

Under his hat, which is where it belongs,

And teaches small children to do this in their turn.

Howard Nemerov 

I'm not sure that even putting your nose or the mind's eye in a book is going to help with the confusion! But I will say it does make for more interesting confusions! Now when I see a bare tree with all its branchings that student's binary tree will be part of that lovely confusion of ideas that comes in with the idea of tree. We learn so many facts, it's how the brain arranges them, all those connections that make them revelant to us, and I love how Nemerov teaches David in such a clever way about those connections that often make more confusions but in such an interesting fashion. Children are not so confused by the world, they just take it as it appears and make up their own stories about it. Perhaps that's what appeals to me about poetry, poets make up their own stories about things, make slant associations, make me see the world for a moment in a wildly different way. Who when hearing of Plato's Republic after reading this poem won't think of rainfall there, or the calorie count of a Diet of Worms <chuckle>! Now I wonder how many times Byron goes into Texas, or if he ever did! Too bad we often try to teach children to keep those luscious confusions under their hat <smile> instead of, like my student, making art of them! The world is full of facts, what we need is more . . . confusion!