Teenagers by Pat Mora

IMAGERY

The imagery used was "I pace the hall, hear whispers, a code I knew...", what Mora is trying to get across is the mother has a vast amount of miscommunication, so she doesn't exactly understand what is going on behind closed doors or in other words their personal life.

CITATIONS

https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/authors/pat-mora/

https://zg19.wikispaces.com/Communication+with+Parents

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/pat-mora

http://www.encyclopedia.com/children/scholarly-magazines/mora-pat-1942

BACKGROUND INFORMATION ABOUT PAT MORA

STYLE

Pat Mora was born in El Paso, Texas, growing up in a bilingual home. Family of a Mexican-American culture, the desert are all important themes in her children's books as well as in her poetry and nonfiction for adults. Many of her book ideas come from the desert where she grew up.

VIDEO TIME!

One of Mora’s most significant legacies will be the creation and promotion of El día de los niños/El día de los libros, which is also promoted as Children’s Day/Book Day.

TONE

In the Teenagers poem she uses a lot of hyperboles. One for example, she says “I see familiar skin stretched on long bodies.”, its mean the mother witnessed them grow up to look different physically, but she still sees them as the child she raised before.

Some of her most recent awards are The Roberta Long Medal for Distinguished Contributions to Celebrating the Cultural Diversity of Children, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2007; International Latino Book Award for Best Poetry in English, Spur Poetry Award finalist, Western Writers of America, and Bronze Medal in Poetry, Independent Publisher Book Awards, all 2007, all for Adobe Odes.

Start at 23 seconds and stop at 1:30 minutes

The tone that was utilized throughout the beginning of the poem was very gloomy, because of how she describes her children are becoming more and more distant from her overtime. Later the tone shifts to admiration, because she has uncontrollable respect for her children since they've reformed to be modeveloped, responsible adults.

WORD CHOICE

Teenagers by Pat Mora

THEME

When Pat Mora mentions the phrase "Doors and lips shut" She is explaining how her children are at that phase where they start communicating less with the family, because they are keeping things private.

One day they disappear

into their rooms.

Doors and lips shut

and we become strangers

in our own home.

I pace the hall, hear whispers,

a code I knew but can't remember,

mouthed by mouths I taught to speak.

Years later the door opens.

I see faces I once held,

open as sunflowers in my hands. I see

familiar skin now stretched on long bodies

that move past me

glowing almost like pearls.

What Pat Mora was aiming to for her audience to comprehend was the complications of raising a teenager, but after wards you admire how far they have come to be, because they have learned and grown vastly over the years.

EA 3.1 Presentation by Kennedy and Zach