AUSSIE

Blog entry posted November 2nd, 2009 by Dale Worsley

In my first “Paragraph Six” I laid bare the belief that has guided me through all my years in the classroom: that the purpose of education should be to liberate students’ voices. I also said that my personal goal was to enjoy myself.

This is all well and good, but what happens to your altruistic creeds and your pleasure-principle-based goals in the face of the monolith: the state, and its tests?

Picture this. A number of years ago, our Knight Errant (me) has been enlisted to monitor the New York State Eighth Grade Mathematics Examination. I am dutifully following all of the protocols. Thomas Merton or any other monk in a Trappist monastery could not have been more faithful to the rites and rituals that attend this examination. Indeed, in the gray, fluorescent-lit halls and the classrooms, all conversation and laughter have evaporated. Devotional concentration rules the hour.  Twelve and thirteen-year-olds are bent to their tasks at scarred beige desks in sanctuaries where all the charts and graphs of normal lessons have been taped over to prevent any sources of information other than those that issue forth from the magnetos of their tender brains. Walking about the room like a Schoolmaster of Olde, with my hands held behind my back, I scrutinize the children, to make sure their eyes aren’t straying to each others’ sheets.

During my perambulations, I notice at the top of the students’ exam papers the helpful hint that the number pi is equal to 3.14. This information will come in handy if the students can remember the formula for calculating the area of a circle. I expend a moment of my life’s energies wondering why this particular tip, and no others, made it through the test editor’s sieves. Then I remember the recent news that the Chudnovsky brothers have linked computers in their sweaty, humming apartment to calculate the infinite number pi out to over a billion digits. (It has since been run out past a trillion). But here, pi, the wild, irrational, transcendental wunderkind of mathematical constants, has been docked to three digits and sheepishly fenced into a math exam.

Something in me protests. I have a conflict. Had these students, in the name of test-taking convenience, been taught a misconception? If I am to fight this, will I be tilting at windmills? A shiver slithers down my spine…
Fast forward through several years of penance, during which I torture myself with doubt: How can I support the state’s brutal reduction of childhood wonder to a tedious math algorithm? Isn’t this tantamount to using our factory model schools for a subtle form of child labor?

Over the years, two events show me the path out of my Euclidean circle of hell. First is the idea that as a teacher you can resolve the tension between your beliefs and what you must render to Caesar if you can just find an idea with a big enough radius to encompass both. In this case, I see that it is possible to teach kids that pi is a number beyond all others in wondrous properties, and teach them that it is a useful calculation tool, too, which, in fact, only expands its power and glory.
Is this expansive notion actually being taught in classrooms? Not many, I reckon. But that’s my job, isn’t it? Not only to teach literacy strategies, but to expand minds? I might not be able to place David Blatner’s book The Joy of Pi in every student’s desk like the Gideons put bibles in every American hotel room, but I can at least advocate backmapping from big ideas whenever I have the opportunity.

The second event is my joyful encounter with Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Pi,” which demonstrates how the number incorporates,

            my phone number your shirt size the year
            nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
            the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
            hip measurement two fingers…
            hail to thee blithe spirit, bird thou never wert…
            ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm…
            heaven and earth shall pass away…

and just keeps on a’goin’… “nudging, always nudging, a sluggish infinity / to continue,” as Szymborska puts it.

The mere fact of the poem. The mere fact of the number. The mere fact that occasions exist in education to discuss pi’s poetic as well as its utilitarian qualities. These things give me hope. Is it a quixotic hope that what we believe and what we must do can be reconciled? That’s not the point. The point is we should try, because helping kids pass the tests and helping them celebrate the world’s wonders both have merit.

For readers of past blogs, I hope you have noticed that I have fulfilled my pinky promise to get to Szymborska’s poem – at last. And though I’m sure Gina the Blog Editor was worried, when I mentioned the infinite number pi, that I would push the word count well past the limit, I have restrained myself to a finite 847 in this posting.

Next post I hope to quell the demon of time. Stay tuned. And enjoy.