Mistakes Worth Making

Mistakes Worth Making

“What You Know” by Peter Ho Davies, is a first-person narrative story about a conflict a teacher comes in contact with. He tells a story about how a teacher teaches his 15 year old students how to write and what they should and shouldn’t write about; while contradicting himself by writing about suicide. The conflict of the story is when a boy, Clark, in the class kills his father, two other schoolmates and himself. The narrator finds himself in a situation where the news is contacting him to explain what happened and how it could have happened. He feels like he is getting blamed for the situation in a way. The news reporter offered money to the narrator if he had any writing that had any clues about what happened and this made him want to create his own story by Clark to get money to help raise his new son. Throughout the story I felt Davies purpose was that people make mistakes, and maybe some are important to make and some can never be reversed.

My initial impression was shocked because of how the narrator talked about his students so aggressively as if he didn’t realize they were just kids learning. For example, the narrator explains how when people ask about his students he says, “The good ones are bad, and the bad ones are tragic.” (82) This definitely grabbed my attention and was very interesting. The narrator is very pessimistic; he disliked a lot of things, like CNN, “I despise the network, its incompetent staff.” He seems to think he is so much better than everyone else. It explains how he could “…write a piece by Clark. I could write it and sell it.” This was extremely shocking and appeared to soon be a huge mistake.

When the narrator talked about his father and how they fought, I found it noteworthy. One time when he came home late, he recalls how his father was yelling and he raised a fist. The narrator thinks “Except if it hadn’t been a fist, if it had been a gun I’d raised, he wouldn’t have had the chance, would he? All...