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Permission to Add: Math-teaching Limericks
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Permission to Add: Math-teaching Limericks

JOURNAL OF HUMANISTIC MATHEMATICS, v 11(1), pp 425-436
Jan 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5642/jhummath.202101.23
url
https://doi.org/10.5642/jhummath.202101.23View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Throughout my years and decades of being a teacher, I have written limericks about every course I've taught, and sometimes courses I haven't taught but reviewed textbooks in (such as p-adic analysis and reverse mathematics, which asks which axiom systems are needed for given theorems). In my classes I usually simply use the limericks as handouts (and allow the students to take them into the Final, as cheatsheets. I say it's an :open limericks exam.). Only on rare occasions do I read any of them aloud to the class or otherwise incorporate them into my lectures. (But the limerick on the General Power Rule does prevent students from making a particular common error.) Most students have appreciated the limericks (on one occasion a student helped me write one, and another Prob/Stat student gave me the title, Permission to Add (having asked, when I taught the Inclusion/Exclusion Rule in its simplest case-n = 2, no intersection-So? We have permission to add?). Other students, however, seem to ignore them-perhaps, for some, they merely signal something else they feel they have to do, something which adds to the stress that students already feel. One student even wrote in his teacher eval that he'd prefer not to have poetry included in the course. (Oh well.) I, of course, have very much enjoyed writing these limericks; they give me new perspective on the subject matter and at the beginning of every semester they help with lecture preparation. I'm now considering writing limericks about my own research; they might inspire the proof of that gritty little lemma, or at least its negation.

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