"What Teachers Make"

The poem I will be analyzing is “What Teachers Make” a slam poem by Taylor Mali. A good place to start is right at the beginning, perhaps before the actual beginning, at the title. The title of this poem is somewhat interesting as there is not actually a title, but three titles. The webpage where the poem is posted reads as the title, “What Teachers Make or Objection Overruled or If Things Don’t Work Out, You Can Always Go to Law School.” I think this is sort of a way to say a title doesn’t really matter in a slam poem, as long as it has one. The main title though, is “What Teachers Make.” Hearing this, the reader (or listener) would think the poem is probably about how much money teachers earn in a paycheck, (which is exactly what Mali wants you to think.) That is the original meaning of the phrase within the poem as well, but as a key point of the poem he transforms this into another meaning. He says teachers “make a goddamn difference.”

The poem begins by placing you into a dinner conversation where an unnamed person begins with, “What's a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?” The narrator of the poem, he himself a teacher, feeling insulted, decides to “bite [his] tongue.” The man from before asks the narrator, “What do you make?” At this point the narrator goes on a sort of mental rant, where says, in reference to the question, “…if you ask for it, I have to let you have it.” He lists the things that he “makes.” “I make kids wonder, I make them question. I make them criticize. I make them apologize and mean it. I make them write, write, write. And then I make them read.” This is only a portion of the things he claims to “make.” In the end, almost as a summary to his list he says, “I make a goddamn difference! What about you?”

The tone of Mali’s poem is powerful and angry but at the same time, proud. In the beginning you can sense a sort of tension rising within the narrator. He is at a dinner, a relaxing environment, until someone insults his job choice. He suddenly becomes angry, but only in his mind, “Because we’re eating, after all, and this is polite company.” Suddenly the voice becomes rushed though after being asked “What do you make?” This is where the shift occurs. The remaining portion of the poem is loud and fast, even from reading it you can feel the emotion in the voice of the narrator. Even though he is angry though, he knows what he does is good, contrary to the other man’s beliefs about teachers. He knows that without him the world would be nowhere, children would be uneducated, regardless of how much money he makes.