Judith Steinbergh: Teacher and So Much More

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

Teachers are rarely content with lecturing, lesson plans and homework correcting. The practitioners of this most noble of professions take their role of shaping future generations very, very seriously indeed. Educators are very often as active in their outer communities as they are within its schools; they have advanced far, far beyond “the three R’s” as they assume vital roles in students’ emotional and social, as well as their scholarly, lives.

Judith Steinbergh, local poet, author, lecturer, group leader, program coordinator and yes, teacher, personifies all this and more. Based in Brookline, she’s been a Poet-in-the-Schools throughout Massachusetts for over 30 years; her numerous accomplishments include five books of poetry and the act “Troubador”, where she and Victor Cockburn create childrens’ literacy programs and tapes through music and poetry.

She has taught and lectured at many Boston area colleges, participated in the Terachers as Scholars programs, and won the 1983 Word Works WASHINGTON PRIZE for "Initiation at Bish Bash Falls.” A Bunting Institute fellow at Radcliffe for the 1996/97 year, she’s been a finalist in many other competitions, including the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities for fiction.

Her books, “Reading and Writing Poetry with Teenagers,” “Beyond Words” and “Writing Poetry with Children” focus on her true love, working with children to develop their writing (and often concurrently, their social) skills. She’s a firm believer in fostering budding poetic muses.

"We listen to the voices of these children", she asserts, "introspective, searching, and profound, and it becomes clearer why poetry has a place in the classroom and in our lives. We owe it to each other and to our students to provide the space and time for this voice, and to listen."

Judy feels that poetry works wonders with developmentally challenged schoolchildren. “Children lacking the motor skills to write,” she says, “children with perceptual problems which hinder their reading and writing, and children with emotional difficulties often show improvement when involved with poetry. Time and again, I see children who are labeled ‘non-readers’ standing up and reading what they have written.”

She attributes her own sensory development to her upbringing. “I grew up in a small industrial Pennsylvania town,” she recalls. “My father conveyed his love of music and language with his violin and his occasional verses. I imitated his little quatrains and, by the age of 8, was creating individualized cards, sentimental or funny verses that showed an ear for meter and rhyme.

“My father, with only a high school education, had a deep interest in the natural world and attended to our double size yard, rimmed with tomato plants, magnolias and dogwoods, and huge maples that shaded a wealth of small creatures and birds. When he grew ill in his seventies, he lost his memory, but he still lumbered slowly along the Florida waterways, wondering at the foliage and the dappled patterns coming through the leaves. He offered my brother, a photographer, and me our deep connection to the world, and the will to record and transform what we experience daily through our senses.

“Now dad’s words go out like dying stars,” she says in “Heirloom,” a poem from “Writing My Will”, her newest of five poetry volumes. (This book, she explains, is “not about the distribution of my estate after my death, but my living ‘will’: my values, my vision, my relationships and connections to the world around me.”)

“There were sixteen Jewish families in my town,” she remembers, “and I was related to most of them. My grandparents, who lived with my mother and I when my father was flying gliders in WWII, my maternal aunts, uncles, and cousins lived nearby. We convened for Jewish holidays and Sabbath meals, and retold the family stories. My grandmother’s mix of Yiddish and broken English had its own music. I can hear it in my head, even today.”

Judy will be reading for the New England Poetry Club on March 4 at 7 p.m. at the Cambridge Public Library’s main branch, and will facilitate “A Poetry Fiesta” on March 9 at 3:30 at Lesley University, which will celebrate young writers’ poetry as part of the Cambridge Poetry Festival.

JudithSt@aol.com | Block Address

Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 18:49:26 EST

Subject: Re: article....

To: Susie@susied.com

Add Addresses

Dear Susie,

The piece is lovely. You managed to put together so many aspects of my work

and writing life. I appreciate your interest and the time you took with

it.