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The things we get away with at a liberal arts university…poetry in a science class? Tsk.

I am struggling with student engagement in all of my classes: poor attendance, poor participation, all those horribly negligent bugaboos that make it hard to teach. So here we are, halfway through the term almost, and I’m trying to shake things up.

I’m teaching a course titled “The History of Evolutionary Thought,” which is also a writing-enriched course — I’m expected to spend half the class time, approximately, teaching writing skills. I consider that permission to get experimental at times. This past week I lectured on the history of geology, Hutton through Lyell, so today I made them sit down and do a writing exercise.

We read poetry.

Can I do that in a science building, in a science course? You betcha. I did. I made them think about a poem about James Hutton. I gave them these instructions:

The idea of Deep Time inspired many writers, and some of them are poets. Today, I want you to write a paragraph on this poem. You can
• interpret some aspect of the poem
• write about the virtue of poetry to science
• explain how it makes you feel
• express your own ideas about Deep Time
• write your own poem!

And here’s the poem!

JAMES HUTTON LEARNS TO READ THE
HIEROGLYPHICS OF THE EARTH
by Ron Butlin
 
Woken once too often by the rattle-clatter
of tumbril wheels on cobbles, the click . . . click . . .
click of distant knitting needles,
James Hutton decided never to go
to sleep again.
 
Then, by the light of several Edinburgh Council moons
(spares, in case the heavens were taken over
by the church), he tip-toed past storm-wrecked
Holyrood Abbey, went striding down
unimagined corridors,
through undreamt-of walls and doors where
Scottish Hope would one day
be cemented into place
(the bars across its parliament windows
wooden, just in case).

The Park . . . Salisbury Crags . . .
 
where several hundred million years ago,
the Earth had cracked itself wide open –
*
Detailed as a map of Man’s undiscovered self,
zigzag Time lies flat-packed,
for everyone to see . . .
 
Stacked magma, olivine, dolerite chilled to glass,
eternity crushed to lines of slowly
spelled-out hieroglyphics, and cut
in blood-red haematite.
 
. . . and Hutton sees it. He’s the first!

First to know he walks upon an ancient ocean floor
(God’s Flood, the merest puddle in all that vastness).
First to hear the stone-hard heartbeat pound-pound-
pounding out Existence.
 
Elsewhere, Revolution has taken to the streets
with an accusation and a scream,
a guillotine-swish . . .
French clocks run backwards to Year One.
 
Sunday 23rd October 4,004 BC?
All in the blink of a biblical eye! says Hutton.
*
Meanwhile, you and I continue turning
on our axis to the tick . . .
tick . . . tick of Time that never
started Once upon a . . .
And will surely never, ever –
 
Ah, these strata, these infinities glimpsed between!

I made them ponder and write for 25 minutes, and then we had a discussion. I think it went well. They were wide awake, at least!

Next week, I’m talking about pre-Darwinian ideas about biological change. Maybe I should read them one of Erasmus Darwin’s poems? Or maybe not — they’re awfully suggestive, and I don’t want to end up like Joe Gow.

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Comments

  2. Walter Solomon says

    GALAXY SONG
    By Monty Python

    Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
    And things seem hard or tough
    And people are stupid
    Obnoxious or daft
    And you feel that you’ve had
    Quite enough

    Just remember that you’re standing
    On a planet that’s evolving
    And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
    That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second
    So it’s reckoned
    The sun that is the source of all our power

    The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
    Are moving at a million miles a day
    In an outer spiral arm, at four hundred thousand miles an hour
    In the galaxy we call the Milky Way

    Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
    It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side
    It bulges in the middle, six thousand light years thick
    But out by us, it’s just a thousand light years wide

    We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
    We go ’round every two hundred million years
    And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
    In this amazing and expanding universe

    The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
    In all of the directions it can whizz
    As fast as it can go, of the speed of light, you know
    Twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is

    So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure
    How amazingly unlikely is your birth
    And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space
    ‘Cause it’s bugger all down here on Earth

  5. John Morales says

    You are quite lucky not to have had someone like me in your class.
    I would have likely disrupted it and been sent off after I expressed my opinion.

    —

    “Meanwhile, you and I continue turning
    on our axis to the tick . . .
    tick . . . tick of Time that never
    started Once upon a . . .
    And will surely never, ever –”

    Ah, yes, the ticks of Time — probably a bit like the Hounds of Tindalos.
    They suck one’s remaining life away.

    (Me, I’m not turning on my axis even a bit, and avoid the weeds of time where the ticks live)

  6. Rob Grigjanis says

    John @5: I know you don’t appreciate poetry. Has it ever occurred to you that you’re just missing something that others find profound? As a tone-deaf person misses the profundity of music. Do you think those people are just fooling themselves? It’s as though you see a shortcoming as a virtue.

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