Excerpt from Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You made that up," he told me.

"What?" I asked, confused.

"White people ain't gonna help no black people." He believed I'd photographically doctored the photo.

That first semester of teaching was so relentlessly challenging that I barely recognized the cliché I was enacting: middle-class outsider visits, shudders.

I was constantly making classroom rules that I then constantly modified. Raise your hand. Don't curse. Don't put down your classmates. Don't use the word faggot. Don't slap—don't poke—just don't touch anybody. Never put your head down. If you put down your head for the whole class, you get a zero. For most infractions, students would get a "warning." If they got two warnings, they'd have to go to the corner, where they wrote a "reflection" or, if applicable, an apology. If they refused, I sent them to the principal. This had worked in my summer training in Houston. But the students here were older and, having been subjected to much worse punishment, didn't care. They had perfect behavior in one circumstance: when our school police officer occasionally stepped into our room. (We had no guidance counselor, no music or art teacher, no functioning library, no gymnasium, no sports teams—or any teams, for that matter—but we did have him.) His presence transformed the class: Whenever he stood there in his blue uniform, his baton hanging from his belt, the kids suddenly became deeply absorbed in whatever I was trying to say. From across the room, the officer winked at me.

I began to distrust my own system. I distrusted punishment. Should a person who forgot to raise his hand suffer the same consequence—a warning—as a person who called another dumb? Shouldn't the word faggot trigger a collective, "Kumbaya"-type discussion rather than a targeted reprimand? Distracted by issues of discipline—the police, the paddling, my own inner Mr. Hyde—I'd suddenly remember to ask myself what I actually hoped to teach. What did I want students to learn? I was an English teacher, but it seemed I could go days without thinking about a book.

A book—even the word seemed outmoded in Helena. Before school began, the Stars principal had warned me that the eighth graders were reading at a fourth- or fifth-grade level and that I, accordingly, should find appropriate "content." I either did not understand or did not want to know what this meant. So I gave my class a James Baldwin short story, and they got frustrated because the language was too hard. I gave them a speech by Malcolm X, hoping to rile them up, but it bored them. And I showed them a video of a young state senator named Barack Obama, who had just made a splash at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya." Everything about Obama's speech, its historical references and its exhortations, seemed too distant for them to grasp.

What was I doing wrong? I wondered. Was it purely a matter of reading comprehension? Historical blind spots? My lack of control over the classroom? My inability to connect with them? I became afraid to share any piece of writing in the black tradition that I considered precious. If it meant nothing to them, maybe it should mean less to me. Deciding to try one last time, I introduced Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Characters spoke to each other directly, the reading level was easier, the format—a play—was new to them, and the story centered on a black family.

It was a hit. The angry banter between Walter and Ruth, husband and wife, got laughs. Their complaints about living in a crowded house got nods. Ruth's despair over discovering she's pregnant made the room go silent. And the students universally loved the grandma: All seemed to know her. Born in Mississippi and religious, she scolded her son for wanting to start a liquor store, slapped her daughter for saying there is no God, and yelled at her daughter-in-law for wanting an abortion. As I assigned parts, the students clamored to be cast in her role. "She don't play," they said admiringly.

Excerpted from Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo. Copyright © 2017 by Michelle Kuo. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.