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Social Studies Through Poetry

Ken Siegelman was a social studies teacher in Brooklyn for 29 years. He found that one of the best ways to teach children is to take an inter-disciplinary approach and tap into their “innate creativity and imaginative ability.” Accordingly, Siegelman started teaching “Social Studies through Poetry,” writing and using poems in his classroom to enhance his students’ critical thinking. He wrote several volumes of poems which centered on historical events. “Children are automatically placed inside the very personal environment of the poem,” he says. “By identifying the persona inside the poem, they are able to touch base with the emotional state and philosophical beliefs of that voice.”

After each poem, Siegelman includes analytical questions for students exploring the themes of the poem. He found that when used in conjunction with a good textbook and primary sources, his poetry method sparked class discussions and arguments.

“History becomes an expression of living people through the poem,” he explains.

Strange Places
Many places webbing
Off these Southern roads
Feel like a battlefield
Left fallow-since the civil war.
Fallen branches shadow skeletons
In the eerie quiet
Cemetery dark.
The soil sponges to my sneakers
Like a mattress left to rot;
Swallowing the uneasiness
Of squeezing on so many
Unmarked graves.
A field of long grass
Just beyond the jungle pines
Feels alive and dead
Like an island
Never visited—
A piebald horse
With a shark’s dumb stare
Freezes in a silhouette.
It stands dead center in the grass
With the sun of fire
Around its head…
I bolt away
With the panic of a man
Struck blind;
Back to the motel
And trucker’s stop.
There the neon sign
With missing letters
Blink the night against my
bedroom wall.
Coding like an early memory
Of downtown Patterson
New Jersey.

Questions:

Americans from different regions and sections share distinct customs and cultures. Moreover, the experiences of rural Americans and urban Americans are also likely to have very different ideas and impressions on what they see and interpret as they travel through America.

1. Do you think you would share the feelings of this traveler in the southern woods? Explain.

2. Do you feel that his fears are influenced by his northern urban upbringing? Do you think southern woodsmen would equally be uneasy in a northern city?

3. The poem’s title is Strange Places. How might you argue that the motel/trucker’s stop is also a rather strange place?

4. What makes places seem strange? Explain.

 For information about Mr. Siegelman’s poems, collected in American Imprints, contact him at 2225 W Fifth St. Brooklyn, NY 11223.

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