From THE OCHRE WORLD - #24

Note: The Ochre World is a 45 page poem, formed at the junction of a dream, a news event, and some photographs of the Lascaux cave paintings. Some of the poem\u27s sections can stand alone, others cannot, but all are enriched by a scheme of recurring imagery and an evolving argument. Although unnumbered in the full manuscript, I have given these sections—which occur late in the poem—numbers, so the reader can feel the duration, at least, of the absent sections. -- J.D. [from original publication, 1994.

From THE OCHRE WORLD - #25

Note: The Ochre World is a 45 page poem, formed at the junction of a dream, a news event, and some photographs of the Lascaux cave paintings. Some of the poem\u27s sections can stand alone, others cannot, but all are enriched by a scheme of recurring imagery and an evolving argument. Although unnumbered in the full manuscript, I have given these sections—which occur late in the poem—numbers, so the reader can feel the duration, at least, of the absent sections. -- J.D. [from original publication, 1994.

The World; The Arena of Civilization

Jon Davis recently completed an MFA at the University of Montana, where he won the Academy of American Poets Award and edited Cutbank. His chapbook West of New England received the Merriam Award (1983), and he has published lately in Poetry, Georgia Review, Tendril, and elsewhere

“To Mr. Jefferson on the Occasion of My ‘Madness,’” “The Campaign Manager Talks Shop”

Jon Davis is the author of Dangerous Amusements (OR Press). A chapbook of his prose poems, The Hawk. The Road. The Sunlight After Clouds, is forthcoming from Owl Creek Press. New work has appeared or will be appearing in The Harvard Review, Gulf Coast, and The Prose Poem. He lives in Glorieta, New Mexico, and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts

Reasoning-and-Proving Within Ireland’s Reform-Oriented National Syllabi

As educational systems around the world attempt to reform their mathematics programs to increase students’ opportunities to engage in processes central to the practice of mathematics such as proof, it is important to understand how this mathematical act is portrayed in national curriculum documents that drive that change. This study examined the presence of reasoning-and-proving (RP) in Ireland’s national reform-oriented secondary syllabi for junior cycle (ages 12-15) and senior cycle (ages 15-18) students. The analyses reveal that there were no differences among direct and indirect RP learning outcomes within each syllabus, but statistically significant differences did exist across syllabi in these categories. Students were provided with statistically different opportunities to engage in pattern identification, conjecture formulation, and argument construction in both syllabi. There were significantly fewer opportunities to engage in conjecture formulation for junior cycle students and significantly more opportunities to construct arguments for senior cycle students. There were no instances of proof as falsification across both syllabi, but students were given similar opportunities to experience proof as explanation, verification, and generation of new knowledge. Across both syllabi there were statistically significantly more RP learning outcomes that were divorced from content than those that were connected to content. The results as well as the implications of these results for the design of national curriculum documents are discussed