Zero Division Poem: Reflection

I was away from class on the day this exercise was assigned, and so I found out about it from my classmates the following Friday. My gut reaction upon hearing about it was something along the lines of: “Seriously? We have to write poetry? This is going to be lame.” I would describe my attitude as being slightly hostile. However, I soon began tossing around ideas, and I kept coming back to the metaphor of black holes, and tears in the fabric of reality. Also, I had been listening to a lot of music by a Swedish math-metal band called Meshuggah, and much of their lyrics deal with concepts like transcendence, insanity and the altering of consciousness. I then mixed these influences together and came up with the idea of zero division as an operation which is so powerful that it can tear the mind apart. Attempting to incorporate imagery was challenging, so I tried to convey the idea of a vortex by using sentence and line structure which got progressively shorter and more abrupt. After writing a few rough drafts, I realized that I was actually getting into the activity, and I really started to enjoy it. As a teaching exercise, I thought it was quite interesting, as it forced me to get very meta-cognitive. I really had to think about how to describe zero division and its relationship to the concept of ‘infinity’ in a very qualitative way. I think this could be an interesting activity to incorporate into a math class, especially to supplement the study of topics like asymptotic behaviour of functions. In the end, I found the experience to be quite rewarding and useful.