Social Studies Through Poetry

Abstract

As a veteran teacher of over 30 years in the classroom, I have had the opportunity to instruct literally thousands of students, many of them appropriately classified as gifted. As I see it, working with the gifted often rakes place in two separate milieus, which I call external and teaching. A way to understand this is by using two different examples. Class A is learning about slavery. Part of their assignment is to visit a pre-Civil War farm/museum, including the slave quarters. They have the opportunity to see people wearing the clothing of the time. They can observe how food was prepared. They can hold in their hands the chains and whips that were actually used on the slaves of this particular farm. When they return to the classroom, they may relate these experiences to how they feel about perceived arbitrary and unnecessary behavioral regimentation at home and at school. I call this external teaching because the members of the class are outside of the experience. Like a televised showing of a police chase on a network drama, the viewer can attentive to the action, but can also detached and unmoved by its outcome. Class B is studying the judicial system. Each member of the class is assigned a courtroom role: judge, defense attorney, prosecutor, juror, defendant, and complainant. Each must research what part he or she plays in the coming trial and present cogent and reasonable responses to the other participants in the role-play. This type of teaching allows the student to become emotionally tied to his or her role. As in the Stanislavski method of acting, the performer lives the part and becomes the character. Gifted students are highly responsive to teaching and welcome the opportunity to use their imagination, creativity, sense of competition, and ability to empathize. The outcomes of internal teaching have been achieved for years through the use of novels (Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer) as well as by movies, theatrical performances, and television programs. Poetry, however, allows for compressing events in relatively few lines, the most economical venue for explaining a scenario. By identifying the hidden speaking voice inside a poem, students are able to touch base with the emotional state and philosophical beliefs of that voice in place and time. In this way, history can become an expression of living people and compelling situations. The poem Crackers (Siegelman, 1992) follows: A family of barefoot whites Hobbled on the red dirt road Twisting past the cotton fields on either side: Winding to the grand plantation house ... slaves bent motionless In the bleaching July sun Glistening with sweat As they watched in Silence. The barefoot men asked the master For food and drink Only for Their children, But knowing they'd get more. Then asking for some work with a clever half-smile As They were down on their luck. They were whispered out of sight To the back yard shade Where they longed to invisible to thoughtful blacks. They Picknicked on the handouts jokes About the 'benefits of slavery For the South.' The poem jettisons the reader into a scenario of slavery in the antebellum South not often dealt with in texts or primary sources, thus allowing him or her to identify with the crackers who capitalized on slavery to increase their status in the plantation caste system. Gifted children are uniquely able to take notice of shifts in paradigm in whatever they read. In the poem Crackers, Asking for some work / But knowing they'd get more, or [Crackers] Whispered out of sight / To the back yard shade / Where they longed to be then Drawling jokes /About the benefits of slavery I For the South' lends an immediacy to the conversation. Secondary students begin, in this manner, to conceive of contradictory paradigms to explain similar sets of facts, which could labeled by an astute teacher as, for example, Freudian, behavioral, economic determinist, or rational worldviews. …