The idea that you can change somebody’s life for the better is powerful. It looms, in particular, over the debate about teachers. Are they good or bad, cheats or saints, unfairly demonised or blindly exalted? Underpinning these opposed portraits is the debate over the nature of the student. One side of the argument claims the student is an impressionable blank slate, a tabula rasa onto which the teachers — if they’re good enough, smart enough, and they care enough — can effectively imprint their passions and knowledge. The other side argues that the student is already permanently formed by his conditions — by violence, by neglect, by poverty. No teacher can change his life. — Reading with Patrick , Michelle Kuo
Reading with Patrick is a memoir about teaching in an alternative school in the American South. The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants in America, Michelle Kuo joins the Teach for America fellowship programme and goes to teach in the Mississippi Delta, where she imagines herself teaching American history through black literature and transforming the lives of her students.
Learning through stories
The school she is assigned to is “a dumping ground for the so-called bad kids… the truants and the druggies, the troublemakers and the fighters who had been expelled from the mainstream schools.” One of her students is a teenager named Patrick, 15 years old and in eighth grade, who “seemed lost, as if he’d gotten on the school bus by accident.” Patrick responds to the material Kuo introduces in class and his work improves notably. “People think I don’t care, but I do,” he writes. The children begin to engage with new ideas.
But two years later, after she leaves the Delta and goes to law school, Kuo learns that Patrick has dropped out of school, ending up jailed for murder. She returns to the Delta to visit him in jail. She spends several months reading and discussing poetry with him every day. Reading with Patrick is the memoir of this period.
Teaching by instinct
My mother was a school teacher. This was in the 90s. There was great anxiety among parents that their children should be able to speak in English. Though she had had no formal training as a teacher, my mother knew instinctively that
children learn best with encouragement and love. She taught her little students English by telling them stories that she made up herself. Sometimes she would put the kids in the stories and make them the heroes of their own little adventures. When she had to go to Mumbai for medical treatment, she got dozens of colourful get-well cards from her students.
When she knew she would never be able to teach in a classroom again, she filled a thick notebook with her stories, from her hospital bed, in neat, rounded handwriting. I still have the notebook. There are frogs, rabbits and parrots in these stories. Sometimes the moon and stars also become characters; tables and chairs come to life; in one story, a grumpy fridge refuses to open its door when it’s in a bad mood. The animals play, have adventures, and occasionally quarrel, but at the end they learn that life is always better for everyone when they make good choices and help each other.
My mother loved her little students, and they loved her back. I think she understood at a fundamental level what Dewey had said about education: that it is not a preparation for life, but life itself. Once, waiting to pick her up at the school gate, I saw a group of children rush across. “Story teacher! Story teacher!” And four or five small kids wrapped their arms around her.
My first job was as a teacher, teaching French and English at a boys’ school in Bengaluru. I read Jayanta Mahapatra’s poem ‘The Captive Air of Chandipur-on-Sea’ with a class of teenagers. I told the boys that the poet taught physics at a university in Cuttack. We located Chandipur on a map. I told them that an unusual thing about the sea at Chandipur is that it recedes several kilometres during low tide. We read the poem together.
Books as teachers
In that Bengaluru classroom, we imagined “the drunk sea at Chandipur” that “spits out the gauze wings of shells along the beach/ and rumples the thin air behind the sands.” Why the sea AT Chandipur, asked one boy: isn’t the sea just the same, everywhere? No, replied another boy: it can all be different, the waves, the rocks, the sand, even the colour of the water changes at different places.
They were answering their own questions. They were learning, together.
There is something about reading poetry together in a classroom. For a few moments, between the taking of attendance and
the ringing of the school bell, between the noisy opening of pencil boxes and the scraping of desks, we had a glimpse of something beautiful and powerful in the lines: something about the relationship between humans and nature. “Who can tell of the songs of this sea that go on/ to baffle and double the space around our lives?”
I looked at the boys’ heads, bent over their books. They would soon graduate from school and set sail in crafts of their own. That was also the day when I first realised something else about teaching: that while teachers are invaluable, in places where there are no teachers, books can fill that space. They can teach the reader to think. I thought of Yeats’s words: that education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
“The ground seems only a memory now, a torn breath,/ and as we wait for the tide to flood the mudflats/ the song that reaches our ears is just our own.” (‘The Captive Air of Chandipur-on-Sea’)
Teaching taught me a lot. It taught me that the work of a teacher isn’t just about transacting material from the textbook or writing on the blackboard; it’s about helping children learn, which includes learning to think. That children learn best not just inside classrooms but also from reading all kinds of books; from sports — matches were fiercely played on the cricket ground — and from drama, music, or just free play with friends. That children can learn a lot from teachers, but even more from each other.
I also saw that children gain just by having a grown-up take an interest in their lives. Some kids needed this much more than others. They were the ones who had something else going on in their lives, who needed someone just to talk to, to help them find ways to articulate the hurt that showed up in the unfinished homework, the indifferent shrug, the flippant backchat.
There was a boy whose parents were going through a bitter divorce. One whose father had been in a terrible accident, bedridden for months. One whose family had moved to India from another country, who was struggling to adjust.
“In the complex portrait of a person’s life, it’s possible that a teacher is just a speck,” writes Kuo. But occasionally, very occasionally, the teacher can be more.
To teachers with love
Fiction about teachers tells a familiar story because of the nature of the project. It often begin with idealism and great plans
of bringing change — only to encounter a cynical system, overburdened principals, an oppressive syllabus, apathetic colleagues, and wary students. The teacher pushes on, determined to make a difference. Teaching is a lonely job and children are easily influenced. This is not always a good thing. If E.R. Braithwaite’s classic To Sir, With Love is at the positive end of this sub-genre, at the other end is Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , about a teacher in 1930s’ Edinburgh indoctrinating her select coterie of girls about art and fascism. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” says Miss Brodie, “and she is mine for life.”
Children’s fiction has a simpler but also, I think, wiser typology of teachers: the kind ones and the unkind ones. Among the kind ones, there are those who are wiser than others; but the best loved teachers are invariably those who are very kind and very patient — such as Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books, Miss Honey in Roald Dahl’s Matilda , and Mr. Browne in R.J. Palacio’s Wonder .
One of the most memorable teachers in children’s books is Mr. Falker, in Patricia Polacco’s Thank You, Mr. Falker , the story of how a kind teacher helped her overcome her learning difficulty as a child. One of the important things Mr. Falker brings to their fifth-grade classroom is the concept of equal treatment. “Right from the start, it didn’t seem to matter to Mr. Falker which kids were the cutest. Or the smartest. Or the best at anything.”
It’s Mr. Falker who tells the other kids to stop laughing when Trisha falters: “Stop! Are all of you so perfect that you can look at another person and find fault with her?” He is the first teacher who discovers that the little girl is struggling to read, and helps her to learn. Meeting him 30 years later, she thanks him. The little girl who once struggled to read has grown up to become a famous writer of children’s books.
The reality in today’s overcrowded classrooms is rather different. Teachers are a beleaguered group at the frontlines of an education system that is under stress. Children get little individual attention as they pass through the school system. The syllabus and the board exams loom over them all. And yet, within all this, there are great teachers working hard every day to make time for kids, to help them learn, and to make a difference in the lives of children. As John Steinbeck remarked, “A great teacher is a great artist… Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts, since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”
The writer is in the IAS, and is currently based in Bengaluru.
