Ode to Teachers

In titling her poem “Ode to Teachers,” Mora signals that she understands its anecdotes about classroom encounters to stand in for a larger and more encompassing dynamic between teachers and students. The speakers’ experiences with their teacher are broadly representative of a positive, supportive, and beneficial educational environment. Therefore, through the teacher’s centrality within the speaker’s other memories in the poem’s final stanza, Mora conveys the formative impact that effective pedagogy can have in a person’s life. The teacher’s “smile” (Line 31) and “faith” (Line 32) are as much a part of the speaker’s substance as a human being as any profoundly impactful experience they have had in life.

The poem tends to modulate between different forms of recognition, acknowledgement, and communication. Moving from the speaker seeing the teacher in the first stanza, later stanzas will introduce speech and then written exchanges. These shifts serve to map out the educational process itself: From the more direct interpersonal exchanges between teacher and student, we eventually arrive at the final stanza’s presentation of eloquence in written self-expression. Mora uses line breaks in the first stanza to convey the speaker’s abashed, evasive dodges of the teacher’s glance. For example, Lines 3-5 break the line twice at crucial moments, the first when the speaker looks “down” (Line 3), where the shift to the following line itself seems to mimic this act, and again at “me” (Line 5), where the break serves to distinguish between the speaker’s awareness of being seen and their self-consciousness. By contrast, once we get to the moment of mutual recognition when the speaker sees the teacher’s “smile” (Line 7), the lines become more syntactically continuous and fluid. The “soft light” (Line 8) seems to flow directly from the teacher’s inner soul and express itself outwardly in the smile that the speaker at last beholds.

In accordance with how the first stanza ends in a sense of the teacher’s interiority, the second stanza opens with the teacher communicating their receptive openness to the student: “I’m listening” (Line 10). The teacher’s provocations to the student to participate in the classroom discussion and “join our conversation” (Line 12) similarly place an emphasis on interacting with others through verbal communication rather than just through looking at another. Perhaps because of this change in emphasis, Mora uses conspicuously detailed and ornamental adjectives when having the teacher describe the student’s own untapped internal resources, such as “neon certainties” (Line 13), “thorny doubts” (Line 14), and “tangled angers” (14). By highlighting the figurative aspects of the teacher’s descriptive terms, such as the idea that a certainty could present itself to the student with the vividness and clarity of a neon sign, Mora implies that the student’s as-yet-unarticulated inner experience are rich with potential. In doing so, the poem takes one further step in the process of transforming that potential into effectively expressed work.

The poem seems to continue its general trend of building upon the themes and images a previous stanza introduces in the following stanza through its focus on the student’s act of “read[ing] and reread[ing] the teacher’s comments” in the third stanza (Line 16). Whereas the previous stanza introduced the topic of verbal communication in the form of speech through the teacher’s rallying comments, represented in direct discourse through quotation marks, here we move another step further into the realm of literacy, as the student now reads those comments in written form. And yet, perhaps in order to convey that the movement from speech to writing need not entail becoming more distanced from lived experience, Mora juxtaposes, or contrasts, the third stanza’s introduction of writing with the teacher’s act of “whisper[ing]” (Line 19) directly into the student’s ear.

The student’s act of rereading the teacher’s comments on their own written work and the teacher’s own act of whispering intimately into the student’s ear work similarly to a method known as apposition, a process of describing the same referent or object using different terms. The object of both the student’s reading and the teacher’s whispering here would be the student’s cognitive development. In other words, Mora uses both the speaker’s rereading of the teacher’s comments and the teacher’s whispering to convey a sense of deepening intimacy in the learning process. This sense that increased literacy yields greater perspective is reinforced in the speaker’s whispered encouragement that the student’s own “stories” (Line 21) and “questions” (Line 22) will “lead us to new vistas” (Line 24).

Mora makes explicit the sense of reciprocity between the teacher’s commitment to the student and the latter’s own development in the fourth stanza, framing it as a relationship of direct influence between the teacher’s “faith” (Line 25) and the student’s “courage” (Line 26). Again giving this interior process an outward expression (just as the teacher’s warm intent radiates outwardly as their smile, and as the student’s certainties, doubts, and angers become manifest in the writing the teacher praises in their comments), Mora gives the reader an external sign of the student’s burgeoning courage in the stanza’s concluding lines. Playing on a range of cliches about student-teacher relationships, Mora presents the speaker’s expression of appreciation for their teacher not in the form of the well-known “apple” (Line 29), but more simply through their upraised hand, a sign of interest and willingness to participate in the classroom environment. Mora seems to suggest in playing on the stereotypes of pedagogy in this way that an educator’s greatest payoff is not flattery from their students but simply the interest and commitment to the educational situation.

The final stanza’s catalog, or list, of memories including the teacher’s “smile” (Line 31) and “faith” (Line 32) works on at least two levels. On the one hand, by placing these memories in community with a collection of other formative life events, Mora showcases the indispensable role educators play in human development. On the other hand, in its almost imitative tribute to the teacher’s own figurative language when describing the certainties, doubts, and angers, the speaker’s florid diction in describing their memories provides direct evidence of the impact the teacher’s influence has had on their habits of thought. For example, the speaker describes memories of “creamy melodies” (Line 35) and the “steady blessings of stars” (Line 37). As a result, the speaker has gained the agency to express their most intimate emotions and experiences through the literacy that the teacher has helped them develop.