University of Iowa Reading With Patrick Discussion Questions
A Memoir's Humble Tale of Instruction
Michelle Kuo's Reading with Patrick avoids the educator-as-savior cliché and opts for a subtler portrait of her human relationship with a troubled student.
In books and films nigh failing schools attended by poor students of color, a suspiciously upbeat plotline has become all too familiar. A novice teacher (usually white) parachutes in, overcomes her students' distrust and apathy, and sets them on the path to college and worldly success. Such narratives are every kind of atrocious. They make the heroic teacher the center of attention, relegating the students to secondary roles. They pretend that skillful intentions and determination take the magical power to transform young people's lives, even in the nigh adverse circumstances. And they care for schools as isolated sites of injustice, never connecting educational disadvantage to other forms of inequality.
Michelle Kuo is a writer who resists the mythmaking impulse, with its clichés and wishful thinking. In her penetrating, haunting memoir, Reading With Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Irresolute Friendship, she confronts all of the difficult questions that the teacher-as-savior genre claims to take answered, and especially this 1: What deviation can a teacher really make?
Her credibility stems, in role, from her willingness to make her misjudgments and failings an integral office of the story she tells. At age 22, afterward graduating from Harvard, Kuo frustrates her immigrant parents' ambitions for her past joining Teach For America. She takes a chore at an alternative school in Helena, Arkansas, a fated Mississippi Delta town populated by the descendants of black families who stayed backside during the Great Migration. By her ain admission, her first year in the classroom is a disaster. She arrives hoping to teach African American literature to her eighth-grade students, only she blinds herself to the fact that most of them read at a 4th- or fifth-form level, and so they are bored and frustrated past her lessons. She wants the students to know "their history," past which she means the history of racist violence in the Delta. But she knows cipher of the trauma they accept inherited; when she passes around a picture of a lynching, a boy named David brings her lesson to a halt by putting his head on his desk and muttering, "Nobody want to encounter that." Instead of defying her school'southward authoritarian civilisation, Kuo initially succumbs to information technology. Once, she recalls, "I tore upward a pupil's drawing, which I'd thought was a doodle, in order to jolt him into paying attending; he never forgave me, and I will regret it forever."
Somewhen, Kuo does begin to reach some of her students, but she gives them virtually of the credit for their progress as readers and writers. When they perform A Raisin in the Sun in class, she looks on, amazed, every bit they compete for the function of the matriarch Lena Younger—a character they adore because "she don't play." When she creates a classroom library and schedules silent-reading periods, she sees their adolescent restlessness requite way to concentration. Before they relinquish the books they like, the students inscribe endorsements on the inside front covers. Until now, Kuo points out, they had never been handed a play or allowed time to read books of their choice. Just expect, she seems to say, at what they make of these opportunities.
Her descriptions of individual students are unusually perceptive and moving. A boy named Tamir, asked to write a poem nigh himself, looks afraid "and peers at a classmate's paper, as though this was the kind of assignment ane could copy." A girl named Kayla, who had been removed from the district's regular high school for fighting, writes herself a letter that says, "I hope that when trouble come up your way, you lot would simply agree your head high and walk abroad with a grin on your face up." Patrick Browning, a student with a history of absenteeism, seems lost as he starts 8th class, "as if he'd gotten on the school bus by accident." He sits at the back of Kuo's class, quiet and easily overlooked. Merely over the course of his eighth-class year, he develops eclectic tastes in reading—everything from Langston Hughes and Dylan Thomas to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—and wins the schoolwide award for "Most Improved" student. When rainwater leaks through the classroom ceiling and destroys much of the book collection, it is Patrick who says to the other students, "Stop crying, y'all," and fetches a saucepan and mop.
After two years in the Delta, Kuo decides to leave her job and go to law school. ("With a law degree, you can multiply your affect," a friend assures her. And her parents are thrilled.) But what might seem the natural ending to her story proves not to be an ending at all. Kuo returns to Helena 3 years later when she learns that Patrick has been arrested and charged with murder. She begins to visit the county jail where he is awaiting trial, bearing books and writing assignments. Her account of the seven months she spends as his tutor and fellow reader occupies the heart of the volume, and information technology unfolds with all the starkness and immediacy of a 2-character play. Scene by scene, it asks what brought them to this place and what can come of their fourth dimension together.
* * *
The night Patrick was arrested, he had gone out looking for his younger sister, but he couldn't notice her. So she arrived on the family porch with Marcus, a man she was dating. Marcus was drunk and belligerent, and when Patrick ordered him to leave, he started talking loudly and acting aggressively. Believing that Marcus was armed, Patrick picked up a knife he had left on the porch earlier in the day. He but wanted to scare Marcus, he says, but then they fought. He can't recollect the fight itself—simply the sight of Marcus limping away and and so falling to the sidewalk.
Patrick doesn't realize that he has a plausible self-defense merits. A white human fending off an intruder on his property could invoke principles such as "stand your basis" or the "castle doctrine." Simply Patrick is a black homo in the Delta, and the prosecutor goes for a massive overcharge: start-degree murder. There is no question of bail: for sixteen months, Patrick awaits his trial in a jail so unsanitary and poorly managed that the land of Arkansas later shuts information technology downwards. And though his public defender eventually gets the charge against him reduced, they never come across until Patrick has his twenty-four hour period in court.
The showtime time Kuo comes to the jail, Patrick blurts out, "Ms. Kuo, I didn't mean to," in what she calls "a tone of supplication." But she presently realizes that he feels an intolerable sense of guilt. Patrick imagines that all the mistakes he has ever made led inexorably to the human activity he is now locked up for. He is haunted by a litany of wrongs he has no way to redress. "The problem," Kuo writes, "was not that he wouldn't confess simply that he had confessed as well much; information technology wasn't far-fetched to recollect he might spend the residuum of his life confessing."
And yet maybe he needed his guilt; otherwise the death would have happened for no reason, a result of senseless collision—of mental states, physical impulses, and coincidences. He needed, for his ain sense of significant, to knit his failures into a story. "Crusade and effect," as he put it. The thread was that he messed upwardly by ignoring God.
But I didn't believe the story he told himself. I wanted to break it. For me to do that, we needed to forge a connection. Just what did I have that I could share with him?
All I could think of was books. There were other things he liked—he'd tended lovingly to his go-cart and said in one case that he wanted to be a mechanic. I didn't believe that reading was inherently superior to learning how to fix a machine, or that reading makes a person better. Just I did love books, and I hadn't yet shared with him anything I myself loved. Had I known how to sing, I would have had the states sing.
The bond they found during their jailhouse sessions eases his torment, as Kuo hoped it would. Nonetheless Patrick never ceases to concord himself responsible for Marcus' expiry. Afterwards he takes a plea deal and is convicted of manslaughter, Kuo asks him, "Do y'all feel guilty?" and he replies, "I know I guilty." It'due south non the answer she wanted. Merely she comes to run across that if she had undermined his sense of himself every bit the agent of his own actions, she would but have deepened his despair. No teacher can "pause" a student'due south story, his understanding of his life, and replace it with her own.
In other ways, too, the course of the relationship betwixt Kuo and Patrick diverges from her original intention. When she discovers that his literacy skills accept deteriorated, she promptly resumes her English language-instructor role—marking every last mistake in his writing, assigning "actress homework to eliminate hereafter mistakes." This makes her sound overzealous, and sometimes she is. Yet Patrick, who at beginning dismisses the idea of homework ("Nah, it'southward over with," he tells her), makes greater progress than she had anticipated. "For me and peradventure for him," she writes, "the task of making a sentence perfect had the effect of containment: It kept unbearable emotions at bay."
In one case they begin reading, Kuo is continually surprised by Patrick's responses. When she gives him C. S. Lewis' The King of beasts, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for instance, she thinks of it as a diversion: "a magical volume, where the heroes were children, and children on the side of good." Merely Patrick doesn't run across it that way. He is fatigued to the character Edmund, who acts wrongfully merely makes amends, and who grows stronger and wiser in the procedure. The story matters to Patrick because information technology allows him to envision the possibility that a person can change.
Similarly, Kuo is not prepared for the intensity of Patrick'south reaction to Frederick Douglass's Narrative. He reads it in a concrete stairwell at night, away from the other inmates, and persists even when he finds himself painfully identifying with the slaves Douglass describes. She half-expects him to deride the exuberance of Walt Whitman'south Song of Myself, but instead he writes lines imitating it, picturing landscapes and cities he has never seen. At such moments, Kuo recalls, "he appeared to me anew, as a person I was just first to know."
For one of his terminal assignments, Patrick composes a alphabetic character inspired by a passage from Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. Addressed to his baby daughter, it describes a journey they might one twenty-four hour period accept together. The writing is and so evocative that information technology humbles Kuo to read it. "I was searching for myself," she admits, "for deposits of our conversations, memories he'd shared or words I taught him. But I was barely there. Each word felt similar a tiny impulsive root, proof of a mysterious strength that exceeded me."
* * *
Dorsum when she was a classroom teacher, Kuo engaged in a sort of triage. "In that location are just certain kids for whom you lot bring all your hope," she writes, and Patrick was one of them. It makes sense, then, that news of his plight would have fatigued her dorsum to the Delta. But Kuo doesn't allow us to forget that his tragedy is not the only one. She hears, soon after her return, that her one-time educatee Tamir is living on the streets in Little Rock, a crack aficionado begging for money. On a school-district report listing the students who dropped out of school in Helena the year afterwards she left, she recognizes a long series of names along with Patrick'south. And when he finally appears in courtroom, she sees many of those names again on the crowded docket of criminal cases:
I tried to count the number of black males of my sixty-something students over two years who had at some indicate gone to jail, and I ran out of fingers. The docket was the coda to the STUDENT DROPOUT Report—the county jail was where the dropouts landed. There were no jobs in Helena. They had no skills. Well-nigh had a disability or an emotional or mental disorder. Where else had I thought they would get?
Nothing Kuo has done for Patrick frees him from this dynamic. Later on the plea bargain, he is sent to an overcrowded prison house. Two and a half years later, when he is paroled for good behavior, he returns to Helena with all the liabilities that come with having a vehement felony on his record.
By and then, Kuo is working as a public-interest lawyer in California. "I brainstorm to think," she confesses, "that those seven months didn't actually happen, that I had imagined the mystical silences we shared while Patrick wrote. I must have dreamed the poems nosotros memorized, considering I cannot remember the lines anymore. On the way to work, holding the metal bar of a subway, I wonder what it was all for and consider the idea that once yous stop thinking almost something, it disappears."
Merely this is not her last discussion on the field of study. If Kuo distrusts the romanticism of the instructor-equally-savior narrative, she also resists the kind of fatalism that would have prevented her from becoming a instructor in the kickoff place. She does wonder sometimes what would accept happened had she never left Helena. Could she have kept Patrick from dropping out of school or confronting Marcus? Non probable, she says. As well, she is wary of talking well-nigh Patrick "equally if I think I could take saved him, equally if I think I'm so of import in his life. It's non like that." Only and then, exhibiting the kind of impassioned writing and difficult-earned wisdom that prepare her book apart, she adds:
Or mayhap it is, in the sense that the culling, the rational thought, would exist to say to myself, You lot can't do that much, you're not that important, in that location are and so many forces in a person's life, good and bad, who do you retrieve you are? That'due south what I said to make myself feel better after I left the Delta, and sometimes I nonetheless say it. But then what is a human for? A person must matter to another, it must mean something for two people to have passed time together, to have put work into each other and into becoming more fully themselves.
Perchance there are prospective readers who noticed Kuo's memoir on a bookstore shelf, leafed through its pages, and put it back, saying to themselves, "I know this story already." But in all of the literature addressing education, race, poverty, and criminal justice, in that location has been nothing quite like Reading With Patrick.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/10/a-memoirs-humble-tale-of-mentorship/543471/
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