May 19, 1999

DOWN HOME:
Math comes from Mars;
literature is from Venus
___Teachers have resorted to torture, now that school's almost over.
___That's the prevailing opinion at our house, anyway.
___"Poetry!" Lindsay fumed last week, fulminating the degree of startled disgust only a ninth grader can generate.
___She didn't need to say more. Her single-word utterance flew so evocatively from her pretty lips that I knew where she was heading.
___But she proceeded: "I can't believe she's making us study poetry. Poetry is some sort of civilized torture that teachers know they can get away with. Besides, this poetry doesn't

MARV KNOX

even rhyme. I just don't get it. This guy must've been on drugs or something."
___Maybe he was intoxicated by the revelry of resonance. Maybe he was inebriated with the wonder of words.
___"Who was 'this guy'?" I asked.
___"Robert Frost."
___Hmmm. The two-roads-in-a-snowy-woods guy. Read poetry at John Kennedy's inaugural. A wordsmith of clarity and grace.
___"I doubt he did drugs," I told Lindsay. "Now, if you were talking about Robert Louis Stevenson or Timothy Leary or ..."
___"It doesn't matter," she said, cutting me off. "The guy can't even make a rhyme. You could take those words and put them in a row and make paragraphs and nobody would know the difference. And when I ask what it all means and why this is poetry, nobody can answer."
___I tried to explain to Lindsay about the power of words as symbols, about the beautiful sounds they make when you read them aloud, about the subtle nuance of meanings. She didn't want to hear my words.
___"English should be like geometry," Lindsay intoned. "In geometry, right is right and wrong is wrong, and at least you can tell the difference."
___Ahh. Now we're getting to the crux of our conflict: The certitude of math versus the infinitude of literature. A linguist's pleasure is a mathematician's pain.
___Sometimes, I think our family flew in from different planets.
___Molly, our sixth grader, and I love words. Molly could fall into a book like Alice stepped through the looking-glass and disappear for eons. Lindsay and her mother, Joanna, love numbers. They see form and order where I see squiggles and gibberish. (Don't you think "squiggles" and "gibberish" are great words?)
___Ninth grade is a lot like life. Some parts offer pure pleasure, and others afford nothing but pain and confusion.
___Fortunately, Christians dwell in the loving embrace of God's Spirit, which provides us with the sensitivity to enjoy the beauty of life and and the grace to endure and even thrive amid the ignoble and tempestuous moments.
___

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