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Thursday, February 09, 2006

Thursday ramblings

February is being less kind to us than January was. It got down into the teens last night. Just a week ago I noticed we had Tulip bulbs coming up already - this can't be good.

I suppose all the warm weather we have been having has only intensified my lust for baseball season. I have actually paid far less attention to off-season deals this year than normal. I'm not sure why, it isn't for any loss of interest in the game.

Baseball and poetry have a lot in common. There is this saying in baseball that the season is too long to let the win get you too high or the loses take you too low. I think the same advise is good for writers, especially poets. You can easily ride the crest of a wave with a success one day and find yourself swallowed by the surf the next. As a result, it's best to try to stay on a more even keel with you emotions as they relate to your work. Besides, what didn't work last week can become the cornerstone for something different this week. That is just the way it seems to work.

Turning colder should put me in the mood for the Winter Olympics. The winter games are far more interesting to me than the summer games. The sking and figure skating are my favorites. I love the alpine jumps. It just looks so utterly awesome when they are mid-air and leaning way forward. I remember many years ago at one of the Winter Games, perhaps Lake Placid, there was a guy who represented England that they dubbed "Eddie the Eagle" that came to the Olympics as a novice. It was such a trip to watch him. I think I and a million other men must have been living vicariously through him on every attempt.

I was thinking this morning about the relationship between poetry and other things in terms of a scale of importance. I'm guessing most put it pretty low. I'm not speaking specifically in terms of education, but let's take that as an example. You are going to budget for your overall curriculum. I'm going to give you $100 to represent that portion that is the total education budget. (I know it is low, but play along with me. Remember Bush is president and we are spending $8 billion a month on Iraq so we don't have much to spend.)

So we have to fund the following with our $100:


  • Math department
  • English Department (reading, grammar, language usage)
  • Social Studies - History / Civics / Contemporary Issues, etc.
  • Physical Education (non- sports team)
  • Poetry
  • Music
  • Art ( painting, Photography, Sculpture, etc)
  • High School Sports (team and individual sports program / after school. Football, baseball, basketball, track, tennis, golf, swimming, etc)
  • Foreign Language
  • Shop / Home making, etc.

There you have what needs to be funded. I'd like to hear from some of you how you'd divide up your $100 budget and use your best argument to make your case - or none at all if you just want to do the math and let it stand on the merit of your priority itself.

Go to it - this should be interesting.

9 comments:

Julie Carter said...

I'm going to be such a heretic and you're going to shoo me from your presence, but... well... $40 to Math, $20 to English, $20 to Foreign Language, and $20 to History.

We need to teach people to think logically, to write and communicate effectively, and to understand the world. If they have this background, they will come to poetry and art on their own.

And poetry is exactly like baseball. It's slow and methodical and harder than it looks and God, it's gorgeous when it works the way it should.

Michael A. Wells said...

Ok, I won't load the gun just yet... you did say nice things about baseball.

I kept thinking I was leaving something off the list- and I did ::sigh:: Science.

I'm not going to sound in on my own just yet. I really don't want to influence the discussion till we've had more participants.

I will just say that having seen your budget I think I hear screaming voices from From ALL of the Arts and of course P.E.

The entire athletic department is picketing. The Home Economics folks are so hot, they burnt their cookies. The shop teacher was heard wondering aloud if the $40 to math might allow in the future people to learn to parcel money out in something other than 20's and multipals thereof.

But hey, My mouth is zipped. I wanna hear more!

Missi said...

$100 to poetry and screw the rest (especially math). Everything you need to know you can learn from poetry, or, um, isn't that the saying? Interesting that you put poetry in a category by itself instead of with English.

Michael A. Wells said...

I had to parcel it out separately to gauge what or how people viewed poetry's value to society against other areas.

Julie Carter said...

I was lumping science in with math.

And yeah, I know that a lot of people would be screaming, but I'm a big girl and I've got earplugs. :D

nolapoet said...

$25 to poetry, $25 to foreign language, $25 to English, $25 to history. The jocks and scientists will find money on their own. $0 to "education" and its pedant-gogues!

Kevin Andre Elliott said...

$10 to each. I don't see the point in privileging one subject more than any other. If students are to discover their potential and develop into unique individuals, they should have the opportunity to explore a wide range of subjects--that means math & poetry.

Also, it seems to me that many of these subjects cross over into others. Shouldn't art be a part of any good Social Studies class? Shouldn't poetry be included in any English Class? And if you happen to be theoretically inclined, math is going to play a part in the study of music.

I agree with Julie that "we need to teach people to think logically...to understand the world." I don't think that scaling education in terms of an arbitrary value like importance is the way to go about it though. The problem isn't that poetry is low on most people's scale. The problem is that learning in general is low on most people's scale. Think about it; higher education today is in most cases nothing more than trade school (not that there's anything wrong with trade school, but there should be a difference). How many students go to college these days because they are attracted to the beauty of math (http://www.valdosta.edu/~cbarnbau/phys_math/p2.html)? Few, I would think.

If we spent less time trying to push our own personal agendas (and yes, mine would be in favor of poetry), if we stopped viewing education as merely a step on the ladder to a good job, and if we spent more time trying to foster curiosity and imagination, the desire to learn because learning is fun, students would naturally come to poetry and art.

Or am I too idealistic?

Michelle M. Buchanan said...

What Kevin Said!

Michael A. Wells said...

::sigh:: Although this subject has achieved response, I had hoped it would spark some real debate on the value of poetry to society. That is why I specifically gave poetry a catagory all by itself.

So what has happened? I have Missi who whats to give every penny to poetry and nolapoet who weighed in at $25 or a quarter of the entire budget. The rest of you ignored poetry as a seperate catagory.

Kevin and Julie bot made observations that show a good deal of though about what is needed in society today from an ecucation standpoint, but I was hopeful that we could be more specific about poetry's value.

So, I will share with you some of my own thoughts on the subject later this week.

In the interum, people are certainly welcome to continue to express their 2 cents or $100 worth as the case may be.