Education Quote by Howard Nemerov

Teaching, Nemerov suggests, is the art of strategic repetition dressed up as revelation. “A teacher is a person who never says anything once” lands like a wry compliment and a gentle jab: educators aren’t just conveyors of facts, they’re professional re-framers, returning to the same idea from new angles until it finally takes root in someone else’s mind.

The line works because it compresses an entire classroom reality into a single, slightly absurd absolute. “Never” and “once” exaggerate the point to comic effect, but the exaggeration carries truth: learning is slow, uneven, and social. Students arrive with different backgrounds, moods, and defenses; the teacher’s job is to keep speaking into that shifting weather. Repetition becomes care. It’s also survival. Anyone who’s taught knows the surreal experience of offering what feels like a perfectly clear explanation, only to watch it dissolve on contact. So you say it again. And again. In different words. With a story. With an example. With a metaphor you hope won’t embarrass you later.

As a poet, Nemerov is tuned to how meaning changes with placement and cadence. The subtext is that pedagogy is closer to poetry than we admit: the same content can be re-issued endlessly, and each iteration can land differently. There’s also a small warning inside the joke. Repetition can be devotion, but it can also slide into rote performance. The best teachers, like good poets, repeat without merely repeating.