Ode to Teachers

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2010

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Education Leads to Personal Development

As signaled in its title, “Ode to Teachers” is most fundamentally a poem written in praise of educators. The speaker’s narrative recollections provide the primary basis for such a high assessment of teachers’ worth, value, and importance. While the poem leaves its most direct forms of praise for the final stanza, when the speaker groups their memories of the anonymous teacher among a collection of other treasured memories and experiences, the narrative of personal growth and development as a whole is presented in service of a larger case for the central importance of teachers. Turning to the other stanzas, the developmental stages Mora lays out in the transitions from one stanza to the next—moving from visual recognition, to verbal exchanges, to written self-expression—are marked at every turn by the teacher’s supportive presence: their smile, kind remarks, written encouragement and praise, and so forth. Mora likewise points toward the effects of this support in the penultimate stanza, as the speaker finally expresses their growing appreciation outwardly in the form of a raised hand. By raising their hand, the speaker not only demonstrates their newly discovered confidence, they also evince their own recognition of the value that the teacher places on student participation.

The case that Mora makes for the value of teachers by means of the speaker’s narrative of personal development resembles the German concept of bildung, a term meaning both “education” and “formation.” Rather than simply absorbing information, the speaker learns how to actualize themselves as a self-aware and social being, as seen in both the participatory raised hand and the introspective memories of the final stanzas. For German philosophers, bildung similarly involved a process entailing the maturation of the total individual, both inwardly and outwardly. These ideas influenced the models of higher education developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, which would have a profound impact on the development of schools in the 19th and 20th centuries. Like Humboldt, Mora regards education as a matter of helping the person grow from the inside out through interaction with others, rather than simply having them collect and retain units of knowledge. In the context with which Mora is most familiar—literacy initiatives among immigrant communities—differences in cultural background make such interaction both more challenging and more important.

Literacy Promotes Communication

In line with Mora’s longstanding commitment to promoting literacy among children of immigrant families, “Ode to Teachers” is also a story about someone learning how to use language both to construct and to express their own sense of identity. We see this in the speaker’s gradual adoption of more sophisticated means of communication and self-expression over the course of the poem. Whereas the speaker is largely silent in the opening two stanzas, the third stanza introduces their writing, albeit in a somewhat distanced way. By the final stanza, the speaker’s ornate phrases illustrate heightened mastery of language. Not uncoincidentally, these literary flourishes serve to give concrete shape both to the speaker’s memories and to their act of choosing the central values with which they identify: family (the “dog’s face” (Line 33) and “sister’s laugh” (Line 34)); nature (“sunrise” (Line 36) and “stars” (Line 37)); and aesthetic qualities (“creamy melodies” (Line 35)). By making the speaker’s eloquence and self-realization coincide in this way, Mora reveals the stakes of teaching more generally. The teacher praised by the student has contributed not merely to the latter’s store of facts and concepts but to their very substance as a human being.

Retrospection Through Writing

“Ode to Teachers” is a retrospective poem, beginning with the phrase “I remember” (Line 1). Retrospection through writing is a key theme in much literature dealing with questions of psychological growth and development, such as William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind. The act of reconstructing the remembered past in writing allows the speaker to have a sense of agency and control over their own process of self-fashioning. But this ability to fashion a sense of cultural and personal identity requires the ability to express that identity to others, a skill for which the teacher’s nurturing role proves indispensable. We can see the way memory and writing are intertwined in the way particular metaphors help give life to the events the speaker remembers. For example, the earliest memory, that of the teacher’s “smile” (Line 7), did not literally involve a “soft light” (Line 8) shining from within. In order to capture and convey the particular sense of the impact that event had in retrospect, the speaker must introduce the metaphorical image of light. The proliferation of metaphorical images coloring the presentation of memories in the final stanza, such as “creamy melodies” (Line 35) and “softness of sunrise” (Line 36), suggests that the speaker’s expanded vocabulary has actually increased the ability to remember and so helps to inhabit a sense of their own identity.