“To month of light verses, returning;
Fourth year of this fourth month’s discerning.
Attempt quaternary:
Chem rhymes ancillary,
With goal of supporting STEM learning.”
This post returns to the more familiar routine of translating past Twitter chemistry poems. This particular limerick was posted on 1 April 2022 and marked the beginning of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 2022.
“To month of light verses, returning; /
Fourth year of this fourth month’s discerning.”
April 2022 was the fourth NaPoWriMo for me (which is difficult to believe). My first year of April poems fell in 2019 during the overlap of National Poetry Writing Month and the International Year of the Periodic Table. The subsequent April routines have marked various stages of progress through the COVID-19 pandemic and thus provided stability during some strange times.
The combination of the fourth attempt at this routine and the theme of passing time (with time as the fourth dimension) together gave rise to this post’s title. In these poems, I use the forms of light verse as structures through which to communicate chemistry concepts; most commonly, these forms are limericks or double dactyls. This April routine provides a “fourth month’s discerning”: a way to practice understanding and communicating chemistry concepts in a different way.
“Attempt quaternary: /
Chem rhymes ancillary, /
With goal of supporting STEM learning.”
This month was my fourth attempt (“attempt quaternary”) at this routine, in which “chem rhymes ancillary” were a useful addition to my academic routine. As can be seen throughout this website, my goal is to use this approach to scientific content to “support STEM learning.”
I suspect I’m primarily writing to the student I once was: interested in the unusual vocabulary and etymologies of chemistry… to a sometimes-distracting extent! However, I hope these essays might be more generally interesting to others as well.
Chemphasis 