Pi Day is Coming Up!

3. Today is
1 the
4 day I will start
1 to
5 make plans for  Pi Day.
9 Even though I'm an English teacher,
2 I can
6 also appreciate
5 the majesty of
3 this figure,
5 irrational in
9 an ocean of logic and order.

On Thursday, my students will be writing Pi-ku! I considered waiting for Thursday or Friday to write about this, but I learned about it too late two years ago and was awfully disappointed. Fortunately, I got to do it last year, and it was a huge hit!

Pi-ku is a fun pun on the word "haiku." Each line of the poem is the same number of syllables as the corresponding digit of pi, so the poem could theoretically go on forever. I offered a prize for the longest correct piku last year, and my students did not disappoint! The winner was over seventy lines long. It's one of my sillier lessons, but it goes a long way toward fostering a joyous relationship with writing during a time of year when we are otherwise bogged down with test prep and the impending end of the quarter. It also does a great job of demonstrating the relationship between math and poetry, something I LIVE FOR that often goes completely unacknowledged.

So often, our more analytical students are turned off to creative writing because it is so subjective. Not so with metered poetry! Where many people feel restricted by rules, I (and many of our students) find it motivating. It gives you a framework to hang ideas from, much like vines crawling up a trellis. It can also foster creativity in more reserved students because it presents writing more like a puzzle to be solved, rather than a nebulous "thing" to be created. 

If you try this in your classroom, let me know how it goes! The students who struggle or succeed with it may surprise you.