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.