But we’re never allowed to forget that this is Kuo’s story. She goes to Patrick’s squalid house to cajole him into returning to school when he becomes truant. She demonstrates that her colleagues are equal parts idealist and fatalist. So Kuo delves a bit into the history and social structures of the Mississippi Delta. Of course, education is really about socialization, helping people relate to each other in a productive social fabric. The chapters are structured by the books she assigned and the lessons they all, including the teacher/author, learned. She introduces various students, including Patrick, and their miserable stories, and her intentions and attempts to raise them up. But her practical side called it a lost cause and a waste of time.
Her idealistic side enjoys the challenges, poverty, ignorance, dead-end lives all around.
So she joined Teach for America after she graduated from college, and was assigned to a school for last-chance kids, ironically called "Stars," in Helena, Arkansas, population 11,000, on the Mississippi River about 60 miles south of Memphis. She should have just continued the narrow course her overbearing Chinese-American parents set for her: Harvard Law, high-powered corporate practice, and more money than dreams.īut, as a Chinese-American (she is unclear about how much Chinese she can speak and understand) herself, she felt alienated from the careers and lifestyles that her peers were gleefully adopting. To hear her tell it, she should have been something else. Too young to know better, and true to her determined nature, Michelle Kuo has attempted to remedy this difficulty by casting herself as the hero in Reading with Patrick. Chips and Stoner, as well as John Keating, the Captain of Captains in “Dead Poet’s Society.” There is no way to encapsulate the entirety of what a teacher does. One of the many ways teachers have no chance in this world is that when we make heroes of them, they become caricatures.
0 kommentar(er)
