Today Pythagorus, or more accurately poems about the man and Pythagorean thought.
Focus.
Linear
equations.
Quadratic
functions.
Pythagorean
theorems.
Sunshine sacrificed for
symmetry.
Daylight dropped for
diameter.
Windows that confine.
Tease.
It’s the way yearning clouds hug lonely
trees.
It’s how the sun
graces
all with
perfect, gentle hands.
The passion behind these
eyes
are hungry for
escape.
Focus.
Natural inclinations ,
unrequited vindications,
unadorned specifications.
These all make for reservations
of forced vacations –
like a sad
and elongated
pythagorean theorem
that always equals =
a bad poem.
my intelligence is not defined by a number, nor a letter.
nor should I be graded on a curve
by people
who don’t know me.
What does knowing the pythagorean theorem
have to do with me being a good person?
what will memorizing words on a page
help me with my rage
raging about how education has become
this conveyor belt
chewing up and spitting out
society’s warped up idea
of intelligence.
Throw me in a classroom with twenty-something students
just to tell me I’m better than him
but not as smart as her
teachers saturating our brains
with force fed textbook equations
telling us this is what we have to know to make it
“make it on time”, they say
“Passing it in late is not okay”
but when I am eventually thrown out
of this conveyor belt of education
the realization will be that life does not have
a set schedule.
my life will not change on time, as you ask
I cannot cram my creativity onto a five-paragraph
piece of paper.
I cannot crunch my knowledge
down onto six pages
about who I am
Don’t give me guidelines
my future does not have guidelines
you think you’re teaching us information
but in reality, you’re teaching us around the system
of how to get a passing grade
but not the exceeding knowledge
knowledge about what?
Our history?
what about our future?
We can’t learn about our future by staring at a blackboard
in a dim-lit room
with twenty-something other people
wondering what the hell we’re doing here
but being too scared to stand up
and ask.
Pythagoras of Samos (b. about 570 – d. about 495 BC) was an Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Most of the information about Pythagoras was written down centuries after he lived, so very little reliable information is known about him. He was born on the island of Samos, and might have travelled widely in his youth, visiting Egypt and other places seeking knowledge. Around 530 BC, he moved to Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy, and there set up a religious sect. His followers pursued the religious rites and practices developed by Pythagoras, and studied his philosophical theories. The society took an active role in the politics of Croton, but this eventually led to their downfall. The Pythagorean meeting-places were burned, and Pythagoras was forced to flee the city. He is said to have ended his days in Metapontum.
Pythagoras made influential contributions to philosophy and religious teaching in the late 6th century BC. He is often revered as a great mathematician, mystic and scientist, but he is best known for the Pythagorean theorem which bears his name. However, because legend and obfuscation cloud his work even more than that of the other pre-Socratic philosophers, one can give only a tentative account of his teachings, and some have questioned whether he contributed much to mathematics and natural philosophy. Many of the accomplishments credited to Pythagoras may actually have been accomplishments of his colleagues and successors. Whether or not his disciples believed that everything was related to mathematics and that numbers were the ultimate reality is unknown. It was said that he was the first man to call himself a philosopher, or lover of wisdom, and Pythagorean ideas exercised a marked influence on Plato, and through him, all of Western philosophy.