Unexpected Results: When Your Math Tutor is a Poet

I hand the teacher a suggested seating chart that breaks up incessant chatterers, puts personalities who work collaboratively close, leaves empty desks around the fidgeter, “And I’ll sit here,” I point, “to minimize the cross-talk and help this one stay awake.” Yes, I put myself in the seating chart—a grown woman with greying hair and progressive lenses. I find it a good place to operate as an in-class high school math tutor, to model how to take notes, pay attention, and raise my hand. (Skills which have been slow to develop with this group of pandemic-skewed students.)

When I began this grant-funded position, my job description was Help. Over the years, working in nearly a dozen different teachers’ classrooms, help has come to mean such nuanced and varied things, that I’d reduce it back to help: help students and teachers succeed. Some days it means spending one-on-one time with a sophomore who’s missed multiple days so she can get caught up. Other days it means I Vanna—namely, I work the equations on the board so the teacher doesn’t lose eye-contact with the freshmen and can better assess how they’re comprehending new concepts. Often, though, I simply bear witness to the public school teacher’s daily struggle. I know all the players and context, so I often engage in after-class debriefs and brainstorming sessions… and rarely make it to my next class before the bell.

At any given moment of the day, I have to be able to jump in at any point in their curriculum: Math 1 – 4. You’d better believe this former English teacher has needed to take and keep good notes! Growing up, I’d always done better in STEM classes (long before the acronym STEM was used), though I chose literature in college. I’d always wanted to take calculus, it just never fit in my schedule.

Which got me thinking: If I was ever going to cross “take calculus” off my bucket list, several years of tutoring math was as primed as this almost-past-its-prime brain was going to get. So I talked my colleague, who had an abnormally small AP Calculus class, into giving me a textbook and listing me as a student in his google classroom. I completed the assignments, quizzes, and tests on my own time, and supplemented with online lectures and Khan Academy.

The author’s desk as she worked on the poem *Coastal Prayer*

Learning calculus for the first time (at age 47) gave me a greater sympathy for the struggling students I was working with. I, too, was standing in the middle of a swirling fog. I, too, was looking for a learning trick, a story, a catchy rhyme to get the new content to stick. My patience and wait time with students increased. I used fewer prescriptive leading questions and more process-oriented ones: What could you do next?

What came next, I didn’t expect. Math became the primary metaphoric language for how I processed the changes in my life. Calculus is the study of how things change, after all, though I didn’t anticipate poems would appear doodled in the margins of my homework and class notes. I can remember sitting in a Math 4 lesson on standard deviation and µ when my brain said, “That’s the sound a cat makes…” What resulted was the poem “Z-Score of Zero” which appeared in the April issue of MAA: FOCUS for National Poetry Month.

The Math 3 unit on circles, with phrases like “secant chord” and “major and minor arcs,” had me humming Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” until it eventually shaped itself into a poem. I saw slope fields when paddleboarding, found myself trying to explain intersectionality as the solution set to a system of linear inequalities, and saw my impending empty nest whenever I looked at the unit circle. I suppose I should’ve seen it as an inevitable function: input enough math jargon into a poet and the output would be math poetry.

Midlife Calculus (September 2024, Press 53) is the collection of all these poems. True to my initial job description, I hope they help. I hope they bear witness to what it’s been like teaching these last few years so teachers feel seen and heard. I hope the book helps math people to appreciate poetry and poets to ask questions about math. I hope teachers use some poems in the classroom: to improve close reading strategies, give a different sort of student a chance to shine in math class, and become a vehicle to cement math concepts into memory. I hope for any reader that there are fewer days like “Domain” (above) and more in which you’re able to “work literal equations / and maybe wonders, / figure the balance between expectation / and grace.”

Math, like poetry, like teaching, is about paying attention to details. It is easy to get caught up in the minutia of a seating chart, a singular skill, or a clever turn of phrase. And while each of those tiny pieces matter, working on them in isolation isn’t enough. What does it mean? Why are we doing this? In the inanity of the last several years, poetry became my way to zoom in for details and zoom out for perspective. I used poetry to make meaning and find purpose, even when sitting, quite literally, in the middle of math.

Bucket List

Find the value.

Work backwards,

and forwards,

Pursue tangents

and follow them back to the point.

Rising and declining,

Dining and relaxing,

Work. Work it out.

Earn your grade, your degree.

Become a polyglot in self-forgiveness.

The differences between become

small and smaller as we approach infinity.

Britt Kaufmann lives and works in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Poems from Midlife Calculus (Press 53) have appeared or are forthcoming in MAA: FOCUS, Scientific American, The Journal for Humanistic Mathematics, as well as several literary journals. Learn more at brittkaufmann.com.