Michelle Kuo > Quotes

“To know a person as a student is to know him always as a student: to sense deeply his striving and in his striving to sense your own. It is to watch, and then have difficulty forgetting, a student wrench himself into shape, like a character from Ovid, his body twisting and contorting, from one creature to another, submitting finally, to the task of a full transformation. Why? Because he trusts you; because the feel of this newer self; because he hopes you can make this change last.”
― Michelle Kuo

“I have to believe that two people can make a powerful impression on one another, especially in a certain kind of place, where so many have left, and in a certain time, when we are coming of age, not worn down or hardened. In these times and places, we are fragile and ready.”
― Michelle Kuo

“How do we diminish the distance between us? Reading is one way to close that distance. It gives us a quiet universe that we can share together, that we can share in equally.”
― Michelle Kuo

“I never learned about Asian Americans, alive or dead, in any class, from any teacher. As an immigrant group, we were convenient on the one hand but also, ultimately, disposable.”
― Michelle Kuo

“There was a cliché about teaching: Once a teacher, always a teacher. But there was truth to it. Your sense of responsibility to your students never leaves you. You wonder about the different paths they might have taken. You wonder if you failed them.”
― Michelle Kuo

“I realized that small class sizes were not just beneficial for the obvious reason -- that larger classrooms ignored, worsened, and evicted the problem student. For a student like Aaron, who lived on the borderline of success and failure, the small classroom provided a magnifying glass with which to evaluate his peers. What did they want, what ticked them off, how did they lose their tempers, what help did they take or choose not to take? Seeing these possible mirrors of himself allowed him to realize he wanted to be different.”
― Michelle Kuo

“The cliché, that I'd gotten out of it more than I'd given, was true. What I had now was a metric for judging what a meaningful day might look like. The metric was this: Could you form a live, difficult connection with a person from entirely different circumstances? A connection so genuine that you forgot that you were even attempting to make one? So urgent that you wanted to show up the next day and that person believed you would?”
― Michelle Kuo