Astronomer, learnéd… expounding
Through proofs, figures: dense and confounding.
The student, receptive
To nature’s perspective,
Will exit the lecture resounding.
This week’s poem is a non-Twitter one; I had initially drafted it during the summer, when I was focused on a series of posts inspired from lines from works of literature, as a limerick-framed restatement of some of the images and themes of Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” However, as this poem is primarily a paraphrase, it did not seem to fit as well with the others, which used direct quotes or allusions to initiate the new verses and essays, so I tabled it for a few weeks.
Astronomer, learnéd… expounding
Through proofs, figures: dense and confounding.
Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” famously describes a speaker’s encounter with a lecture from a renowned scientist. The speaker first notes the overwhelming amount of data presented in the auditorium: “When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, / When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them…”
I teach many content-heavy chemistry courses. I appreciate their roles in various disciplinary curricula, but I am also aware that the first presentations undoubtedly seem “dense and confounding” to new students.
The student, receptive
To nature’s perspective,
Will exit the lecture resounding.
Whitman’s poem concludes with lines describing how the speaker seeks refuge from the information-dense presentation in a primary encounter with astronomical observation: “[R]ising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, / In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
The student is clearly open to appreciating the subject matter at hand (in the limerick phrasing: “receptive / [t]o nature’s perspective”), but via a direct, self-initiated study: the truest example of active learning.
I expect that the limerick form might seem trivializing here, but I had intended this verse as a tribute. Whitman’s poem is one I remember when teaching, where my goal is primarily that students progress toward becoming independent life-long learners, regardless of their responses to the chemistry content presented. In reading, I find the effect of the speaker’s shift from the passive voice (“When I was shown”) to the active observation (“I… [l]ook’d up in perfect silence at the stars”) to be unfailingly moving.
Chemphasis 