Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poet Extraordinaire

That Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of America's most outstanding poets is hardly a little-known fact. That he was also an accomplished mathematician is something few people know. One of the problems mathematics instructors face is dealing with mathematics anxiety and the myth that “some people have a math mind and some don't” (Kogelman and Warren 1978). Mathematics is often viewed as a “mystique accessible to few” (Buxton 1981); and even many educators will categorize a student as a non mathematics person, thus students “are steered away from precollege mathematics” and “not even given the chance to fail” (Tobias 1978). We forget that success in mathematics is dependent on interest as much as ability. and I am afraid that we often do not take the steps we could to reach individual students