Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

by Michelle Kuo

Overview

A life-changing friendship between an idealistic young teacher and her gifted student, jailed for murder in the Mississippi Delta

Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer in 2004, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning, and his remarkable literary and political awakening.
  
Convinced she can make a difference in the lives of her teenaged students, Michelle Kuo puts her heart into her work, using quiet reading time and guided writing to foster a sense of self in students left behind by a broken school system. Though Michelle loses some students to gun violence and truancy, she is inspired by students such as Patrick. Fifteen and in the eighth grade, Patrick begins to thrive under Michelle’s exacting attention, rising to meet her rigorous expectations. However, after two years of teaching, Michelle feels pressure from her parents and the draw of opportunities outside the Delta, and leaves Arkansas to attend law school.

Years later, on the eve of her graduation, she learns that Patrick has been jailed for murder. Feeling that she had left the Delta prematurely, and determined to fix her mistake, Michelle returns to Helena and resumes Patrick’s education—even as he sits in a jail cell awaiting trial. Every day for the next seven months they pore over classic novels, poems, and works of history. Little by little, Patrick grows into a confident, expressive writer and a dedicated reader galvanized by the works of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, W. S. Merwin, and others. In her time reading with Patrick, Michelle is herself transformed, contending with the legacy of racism and the question of what the privileged owe to those with bleaker prospects.

Reading with Patrick is an inspirational story of friendship, a coming-of-age story for both a young teacher and a student, an expansive, deeply resonant meditation on education, race, and justice in the rural South, and a love letter to literature and its power to transcend social barriers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812997316
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michelle Kuo taught English at an alternative school in the Arkansas Delta for two years. After teaching, she attended Harvard Law School as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and worked legal aid at a nonprofit for Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California, on a Skadden Fellowship, with a focus on tenants’ and workers’ rights. She has volunteered as a teacher at the Prison University Project and clerked for a federal appeals court judge in the Ninth Circuit. Currently she teaches courses on race, law, and society at the American University in Paris.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***
Chapter 1
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Excerpted from "Reading with Patrick"
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Copyright © 2017 Michelle Kuo.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
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Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Part I

1 A Raisin in the Sun 3

2 The Free Write 13

3 The Fire Next Time 42

Part II

4 The Death of Ivan Ilyich 73

Part III

5 Crime and Punishment 115

6 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 134

7 He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven 165

8 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 180

9 I Have Read Everything on This Paper (The Guilty Plea) 209

10 To Paula in Late Spring 231

Part IV

11 Easter Morning 261

Author's Note 283

Acknowledgments 289

A Reader's Guide 297

Reading Group Guide

1. What challenges do rural areas such as the Arkansas andMississippi Deltas face, and how are they different from urbanareas? Why do you think we hear so little about rural education,employment, and crime in the news? Why do they getunderresearched and underreported?

2. Can the classroom protect students from the deprivationoutside of it? Can it further that deprivation? How do Michelle’s experiences confirm or challenge your ideas about the transformative power of the classroom?

3. How is reading alone different from reading together? Considerexperiences you’ve had being read to or instances whereyou’ve read to others.

4. What does poetry do that other texts can’t? Consider the “I Am” poem in school and poetry in the county jail.

5. What changes do you see in Michelle as a teacher? How would you compare her individual lessons with Patrick to hertime as a formal teacher?

6. Patrick is a stranger when Michelle meets him, but overtime she begins to feel an ethical responsibility for his life.Why? Does she owe him anything? Why does she think shedoes, and how does he respond?

7. Michelle and Patrick ask each other their favorite lines fromliterature. Why does this act of sharing open up conversationbetween them? What are some of your favorite lines from thebook? (This can include lines from the poetry and books thatthey read together.)

8. Patrick does not blame his circumstances for his hard life.Michelle clearly does. What do you make of their disagreement? Would you have tried to convince him otherwise?

9. Among other histories, we witness passages on migration,rural organizing of Back-to-Africamovements, and violencein the Arkansas Delta. How do these historical scenes help usto make sense of the memoir’s present-daycircumstances andevents?

10. This book is as much an Asian American story as it is anAfrican American story. How does being Asian American helpexplain Michelle’s choices, including the decision to go to theDelta and the decision to leave?

11. Can two people who have a radical power difference everconnect through a genuine feeling of equality? Michelle questionsthis idea, except for in one instance: when they read together.Why would literature, or any kind of art, open up thatpossibility of experiencing equality with one another? Andwhy would she call that experience “fleeting”?

12. Michelle could have ended on the optimistic note of Part 3,where, after intensive daily work together, Patrick has becomea writer of exquisite sentences and a sophisticated reader. Butshe doesn’t. We are told that life after prison for Patrick—findinga job, feeling at home in the Delta—“was a new battle,excruciating, and, unlike incarceration, with no end date.”Why do you think Michelle includes this information? Does itchange the meaning of their seven months together if Patrickstill struggles after?

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/01/2017
After graduating from college, Kuo moved to Helena, AR, as a Teach for America volunteer. There, she encouraged students to find their voice by assigning readings from black authors and having students write self-reflective pieces. One of the students, Patrick Browning, transformed from a withdrawn pupil into a thoughtful young writer. When her contract ended, Kuo went on to Harvard Law School. Two years later, she learned that Patrick was in jail for murder. Kuo returned to Helena and tutored Patrick as he lingered in jail, awaiting a trial that may never happen. This account is her memoir of this time, but it is also a meditation on race in America. The author weaves her personal story with that of Patrick and the other students who crossed her life in Helena. She witnesses how many Americans are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and comes to several of the same insights as J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy. What differentiates Kuo's work is that throughout her experience, she discovers the healing power of literature. VERDICT This memoir of teaching literature in one of the poorest counties in America is a reminder of how literacy changes lives. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/6/17.]—John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston

Library Journal

2017-05-08
The story of a mutually transformative friendship between the author and a black student she met as a Teach for America volunteer in Arkansas.Kuo (Race, Law, and Society/American Univ. of Paris) knew that her post-college plan to teach underprivileged students "American history through black literature" in the tiny Mississippi Delta town of Helena went against what her ambitious Taiwanese parents wanted for her. Yet the need to obey the dictates of a strong social conscience was stronger than the desire for material gain and success. Once in Arkansas, Kuo quickly discovered that her assignment at an underfunded alternative middle school was far more difficult than she had imagined. Most of her students had never encountered an Asian person before, and in her more disillusioned moments, the author found herself thinking that she was just a "cliché [of the] middle class outsider." Her friendship with 15-year-old Patrick Browning, a quiet young black man in her eighth-grade class, became her saving grace. Patrick thrived under Kuo's tutelage, revealing a profound sensitivity and intelligence that moved the young teacher. Acceptance to law school took Kuo to Harvard, where, during the course of her studies, she learned that Patrick was in jail, charged with murder. Desperate to find a way to help her former student, she put off building the legal career she now realized inspired no passion to return to Arkansas. As the author helped Patrick's lawyer find justice for her client, she visited Patrick—who committed the crime in order to protect a family member—in jail every day. The two read classics by such writers as Frederick Douglass, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, and Walt Whitman while confronting painful questions about race and belonging. In the process, Kuo helped Patrick come to terms with his troubled past and learn to look toward the future with greater hope. Honest, thoughtful, and humane, Kuo's book is not only a testament to a remarkable friendship, but a must-read for anyone interested in social justice and race in America. Thoughtfully provocative reading.

Kirkus Reviews

Penetrating, haunting . . . In all of the literature addressing education, race, poverty, and criminal justice, there has been nothing quite like Reading with Patrick.”—James Forman, Jr., and Arthur Evenchik, The Atlantic

“Reading with Patrick could be the most affecting book you’ll read this year. To experience such a spectrum of responses—from anger to admiration, disbelief to inspiration, helpless frustration to stand-up-and-shout-cheering—should be enough impetus to get you urgently ‘reading with Patrick’ as soon as possible.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Three out of four stars!”—USA Today

“Honest, thoughtful, and humane, Kuo’s book is not only a testament to a remarkable friendship, but a must-read for anyone interested in social justice and race in America. Thoughtfully provocative reading.”—Kirkus Reviews

“This memoir of teaching literature in one of the poorest counties in America is a reminder of how literacy changes lives. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Michelle Kuo’s Reading with Patrick is a strikingly candid and insightful meditation on the relationship between a young teacher and a former student as they read together while the student awaits trial for murder in a Southern jail. Compulsively readable, the book manages to do two extraordinary things at once: it offers a poignant and moving account of a specific relationship, and it grapples searchingly with universal themes around families, race, poverty, teaching, and the power of literature. The book will continue to resonate long after you have put it down and returned to the everyday—this is what the best books, the best teachers, do.”—Carol S. Steiker, Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law, faculty co-director of the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School
 
“Warmhearted but never sentimental, and acutely self-aware, Michelle Kuo’s memoir is the most profound, tender, and intensely moving portrait of a student-teacher relationship I’ve ever read. It shows how deeply a student and teacher can change each other’s lives. Kuo knows the complications and the limits of helping, but she is brave and generous and stubborn enough to do it anyway.”—Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning

“This book is special and could not be more right on time. It’s an absorbing, tender, and surprisingly honest examination of race and privilege in America that helps articulate what is often lost, seemingly intentionally, in national debates over criminal justice and education: the inner life and imagination of a young person.”—Wes Moore, author of The Other Wes Moore

“Every American should read Michelle Kuo’s remarkable memoir. Honest, generous, humble, and wise, Reading with Patrick will endure as a defining story for our times and, abidingly, a testament to the power of language and of books.”—Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs

From the Publisher

Michelle Kuo narrates her memoir about her relationship with Patrick, a student she first met as a young teacher in the Mississippi Delta who made a lasting mark on her life. Kuo’s straightforward narration provides clarity, although her lack of nuance in pitch and tone gives everything the same weight, whether it’s her ambivalence about starting law school or the news years after she left the Delta that Patrick is in jail for murder. Not creating unique voices for individual people, particularly Patrick, seems a lost opportunity to add depth to the production, but Kuo’s story of reconnecting with him and beginning a dialogue with him through literature is a fascinating one that will capture many listeners. A.F. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2017 - AudioFile