Reading "Reading with Patrick"

Michelle Kuo's teaching memoir Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, A Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship describes her attempt to "save" a struggling student, but it soon becomes clear that the life she saves may be her own. Though the book is suffused with the sort of Teacher-as-Messiah imagery that lures so many into teaching before tragically reminding them that they can't save everyone (or possibly anyone), Kuo's thoughtful self-reflection deconstructs that imagery by showing how a messianic attitude may in itself erect barriers between teachers and students. 

The book begins with Kuo's two-year term as a Teach for America instructor in Helena, Arkansas, where the Harvard graduate steps into a classroom full of black students ill served by an educational system that marginalizes the poor. Entering the classroom as a crusader for justice, Kuo quickly finds her superhero cape wilting as her attempts to forcefully impose her own worldview on her students fall flat. The book then details her transformation into a teacher who cares enough about her students to get to know them and meet them where they are.

The bulk of the book deals with one student, Patrick Downing, who seems to make progress under her tutelage. But when she leaves Helena to enter law school at Harvard, Patrick quickly declines and ends up eventually behind bars, accused of murder.

Kuo's sense of responsibility inspires her to return to Helena to try to repair the damage, a process she describes in elegant prose that nevertheless grasps the gritty lives of her poverty-stricken subjects. The best parts of Reading with Patrick describe the months she spent visiting him in jail, reading books first to him and them with him, responding to his writing and constantly re-evaluating her own role as a teacher. Kuo's depth of research is evident in eye-opening passages about the history of racial violence in the Mississippi Delta and the impact of educational policies on the quality of education, but her deepest research looks into her own heart, examining her complicity in the lives of her students. Toward the end she concisely describes the complexity of this role:

And yet to know a person as a student is to know him always as a student: to sense deeply his striving and in his striving to sense your own. It is to watch, and then have difficulty forgetting, a student wrench himself into shape, like a character from Ovid, his body twisting and contorting, from one creature to another, submitting, finally, to the task of a full transformation. Why? Because he trusts you; because he prefers the feel of this newer self; because he hopes you will help make this change last.

Note the repetition of "know": while she may begin her teaching career convinced that teacher knows best, Kuo discovers along the way that she can make the biggest impact on students only when she takes the time to know them, their families, their lives, to know the world as they see it. This patient commitment to knowing inspires the student/teacher trust that makes transformative learning possible.

Reading with Patrick made me cry but it also made me think about how I relate to students and how I can commit to knowing the world through their eyes. Kuo shows that swooping into a classroom like a superhero out to "save" the students from themselves only leads to frustration and regret--after all, what about all the students she doesn't help? What about the ones who drop out or get shot or take drugs or otherwise slip through her grasp? Despite this, Kuo demonstrates how the careful attempt to know one student well, to enter into his world and learn with him, can be a life-changing experience--not just for the student but for his teacher.