Ode to Teachers

Pat Mora’s “Ode to Teachers,” included in her volume of love poems written for teenagers, Dizzy in Your Eyes: Poems About Love (2010), is an encomium, or poem of praise, to an anonymous teacher from the speaker’s childhood. The speaker of the poem celebrates their childhood teacher—whether from primary school or high school is unclear—by recounting specific memories of interactions that they recall as having contributed to their growth and development both as a student and as a human being. The poem uses its rehearsal of childhood memories to examine the ways our personalities are formed through interactions with others that leave a lasting impression on our sensibility.

Both the sentiment and the style of “Ode to Teachers” reflect Mora’s background as a university administrator, museum director, popular speaker, consultant, and teacher dedicated to promoting values of inclusivity. The poem’s clear and unambiguous message likewise caters to its volume’s target audience of high school students and teenagers from various backgrounds. Its emphasis on student centered learning aligns “Ode to Teachers” with curricular goals promoted within a wide range of administrative contexts. While the ode is a poetic subgenre with a long history stretching back to ancient poets like Pindar and Horace, and later rejuvenated by the Romantics, Mora plays loose with the ode’s formal conventions of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, favoring instead the term’s more general sense of a formal address to someone or something, in this case the teacher.