Reading with Patrick: A Instructor, a Student, and a Life-Irresolute Friendship

Past Michelle Kuo. Read about it on Amazon.

3 thoughts on "Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Educatee, and a Life-Changing Friendship"

  1. Valerie Lo

    This is a fantastic volume that would piece of work well for the campus reading program. Information technology weaves together timely issues of race, class, gender equally it focuses on the growing friendship between a Harvard educated Asian American instructor (who is also a child of immigrants), and an African American boyfriend who serves time in prison for murder. But, this is no ordinary memoir. Kuo documents her years in the Delta, a place where the educational system is failing the students, jobs are almost non-existent, and access to whatsoever forms of culture from film theaters to bookstores is absent-minded. Kuo interweaves African American history and uses the works of Frederick Douglass, amid others, to connect the past to the present day reality for impoverished Blacks in the American South. Kuo's pic of the Delta is bleak, yet she juxtaposes the extreme poverty, ramshackle architecture, and desolation with the natural dazzler that continues to persist despite neglect. Kuo also self-reflects on her privilege as the child of parents who would practise anything for her education and whose status as an Asian American gives her access to a world that many of her students have been excluded from. Kuo also (and quite beautifully) comments on the base human needs between people. As a teacher, she helps her former student learn to capeesh poetry, craft letters to his daughter, and find ways of using the written word to help heal some of his despair. We likewise get to go on with Kuo when she leaves the Delta, spends time in New York and San Francisco and lives the life of a post-college, and and so post-law school grad. From the start, she is idealistic, daring and willing to disappoint her parents for what she believes she must do. The writing is gorgeous. The commentary on the underfunded criminal justice system and educational system in a so-called developed nation is sickening but necessary knowledge. The way that junior loftier and high-schoolers learn to love books is heartbreaking in its simplicity. Kuo took young people and showed them that they could escape the globe and look into the mind of another and soon students began to bear both fiction and memoirs with pride. This volume crosses disciplines and would work well in courses in Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, African American Studies, History, American Studies, Social Studies, Education, and English Literature. The book was published in 2017 and favorably reviewed in The Atlantic. One passage that stands out and depicts Kuo'south hopefulness as well as questioning of our base need for connection is the following: "But so what is a man for? A person must affair to some other, 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." What Kuo teaches Patrick opens his heed to possibility. What Patrick teaches Kuo seems space.

  2. Elena Klaw

    I read "Reading With Patrick" every bit well and I didn't find it as engaging and as relevant equally "The Distance Between Us." It seems that many books and movies have represented the experience of the young, more privileged instructor coming to an underserved function of the country to work with African American students in poverty. I am non sure our students will relate to either narrative closely, that of the teacher who, in the face of pressure from immigrant parents, went to Harvard Police force Schoolhouse, or that of rural poverrty and increration in the deeply segregated s. The author, herself is clearly an inspiration and I admire her greatly.

  3. Kathleen McSharry

    "Reading with Patrick" is an incredible book that should be read by all student teachers. It is beautifully written and raises a wealth of issues that student teachers should ponder at length in a structured learning environment. As such, I don't believe that it would work well as a campus reading choice. Kuo's memoir incorporates compelling stories that merit deep word, merely her narrative is non driven by stories in a manner that would immediately invite all of our students to continue reading. I don't mean that information technology's too sophisticated; it's simply that the material is presented in a way that does non immediately hook a reader. I recommend that we refer this book to the College of Education for their consideration on how to incorporate the book into their teacher education programs.