Download Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship AudioBook Free
A memoir of contest, inequality, and the energy of literature told through the life-changing friendship between an idealistic young professor and her gifted scholar, jailed for murder in the Mississippi Delta. Lately graduated from Harvard College or university, Michelle Kuo found its way to the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Coach for America volunteer, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon came across the jarring realities of life in another of the poorest counties in the us, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In such a stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but worthwhile mentorship of 1 scholar, Patrick Browning, and his remarkable literary and personal awakening. Confident she can make a difference in the lives of her teenage students, Michelle Kuo puts her center into her work, using silent reading time and led writing to foster a feeling of do it yourself in students left behind by a damaged school system. Though Michelle loses some students to truancy and even gun violence, she actually is inspired by some, such as Patrick. Fifteen and in the 8th grade, Patrick begins to thrive under Michelle's exacting attention. However, after two years of teaching, Michelle seems pressure from her parents and the get of opportunities outside the Delta and leaves Arkansas to attend law school. Then, on the eve of her law-school graduation, Michelle discovers that Patrick has been jailed for murder. Being that she still left the Delta prematurely and identified to repair her problem, Michelle results to Helena and resumes Patrick's education - even as he sits in a prison cell awaiting trial. Every day for the next seven calendar months, they pore over basic novels, poems, and works of record. Over time Patrick grows up into a assured, expressive writer and a passionate reader galvanized by the works of Frederick Douglass, Wayne Baldwin, Walt Whitman, W. S. Merwin, as well as others. In her time reading with Patrick, Michelle is herself altered, contending with the legacy of racism and the questions of what constitutes a "good" life and the particular privileged owe to those with bleaker prospects. Reading with Patrick can be an inspirational tale of friendship, a coming-of-age tale of both a young teacher and a student, a deeply resonant deep breathing on education, contest, and justice in the rural South, and a love letter to literature and its own power to transcend social obstacles.
