PA 2013- MLK Marade Plus More

            Each week on Monday unless I am somehow delayed I will write a blog post about the previous week in Public Achievement. In each blog post, I will include a general review of what happened, then an evaluation of how this contributed to our overarching team goals in PA as well as my personal goals. The main purpose of these blog posts is for me to reflect upon each week’s activities in order to be better prepared for the next week. In this sense, it is a working blog. But it will also serve as an overarching guide to the development of my thoughts over the course of the next two quarters, a chronicle of the transformations in my perspective on civic engagement. Unlike the previous year, I am starting PA midway through and my fellow coaches have considerable more experience working with the students than I do, so at times I might privilege their perspectives over my own.

            Several events of importance occurred in this past week. On Monday, both the inauguration of President Obama and the birthday of Martin Luther King Junior were celebrated. For Martin Luther King Junior day, we took some of our PA students downtown to join in the MLK Marade, a march/parade (hence marade) that travels from City Park near East High School all the way to Civic Center Park and the State Capitol building. Thousands of people and hundreds of organizations participate in the Marade in honor of MLK’s enormous contribution to civil rights and the continuing struggle for equality and liberty in America. Eight of the students from my PA class participated and the event provided me with the opportunity to finally engage with our students on a one to one basis. I was able to make posters in collaboration with D___ and R___. R___’s poster stated “Equality comes from within us…” and D___’s poster stated “I have a dream that all races will come together as one.” D___ is known to be quite the wild child, so I was actually impressed by the amount of effort and thought he was able to coordinate into the poster and then into class on Friday. I also was able to make some great connections with the other students as we walked along the extremely long parade route. Fortunately, our fearless leader, Cara had given everyone neon green backpacks. I can’t begin to tell you how helpful these backpacks were in keeping track of my students and fellow coaches who all were running in a hundred directions at once. Afterwards, we ate lunch and then rode the bus with our students back to South High School. As compared to the morning, the students were much friendlier towards me. Overall, the Marade was very successful as an event to build better relationships with our students and recognize the contributions to civil rights and the community of those that came before us.

            On Friday, the main goals for our PA class were to reflect on the Marade and Frank DeAngelis’s talk from the previous week, then to identify whether we were going to work on the broad issue of violence in general or something more specific, and finally to explore the root causes of our chosen focus (Frank discussed violence as it related to the Columbine High School shootings where he is Principal). The reflections on the Marade and Frank’s talk went very well and the students that attended the Marade were particularly engaged. Unfortunately, once we had moved on, we spent the rest of the class period stuck on clarifying what issue/sub-issue we would focus on. Emily, my co-coach took the lead in guiding this discussion, and we were able to discern that there was student interest in at least three sub-issues: gang violence, school violence, and domestic violence. Nevertheless, we were unable to get the students to commit to focusing on only one of these sub-issues or to agree to separate into smaller groups. To compound, this problem several students in the back of the class were disengaged from the whole process. While most of the students responded well to the questions we put towards them, I still felt neutral about whether we accomplished anything during the class. It was especially hard for me to judge progress, because of my relative lack of experience with these students as compared to the other coaches due to my studying in Japan the entire previous quarter.

            In general, I felt that I made progress on several of my goals for PA on both Monday and Friday, though I felt more successful on Monday. My communication with the students definitely improved over previous weeks and I felt a personal connection from several of the students built on Monday and continued on Friday. I felt that the students definitely took something away from Frank’s talk and the Marade in that it gave them a chance to remember and see the contributions of others to their issues while allowing them to take limited actions themselves. Frank left our students with a challenge to talk to others all by themselves at lunch and several of the students went through with it even though they felt uncomfortable or weird doing so. Between this and the active engagement in the Marade, I was happy that our students were doing something active to engage with the issue of violence this week. I also was impressed by the ideas that the students were throwing out such as visiting the jail to see the consequences or violence or bringing Frank back to give his talk to all of the students at the school. By in terms of what my team contributed to these efforts, I felt dissatisfied. On Friday, we failed to coordinate well enough who would take on what task, what the other coaches would be doing when they were not taking the lead, how roles would be divided between the team leads and the coaches, and how we would transition between each topic for discussion. Part of this failure came from failing to follow the lesson plan, but part of it came in the uncertainty caused by this being the first week that we had a normal fifty minute class period to fill. Regrettably, these problems left Emily with the major burden of directing the class. Because of these issues, I plan to bring up the issue of team dynamics at our meeting tonight. Nevertheless I felt positive about how interested the majority of our students were in the discussion!

            This Saturday I will be attending the statewide PA Conference in Boulder, so hopefully I will have some fresh new insights on PA in the rest of the state and on what to do with our students!

All Things Must Come to an End

Note: Actually written in May 2012.

Looking back on my time within the Public Achievement program at DU, I find myself both hesitant to bring my thoughts to a close, and excited to apply what I have learned to my future ventures. PA provided me a dramatic introduction to working with high school students, dealing with issues of cultural competency, and working with a small team of individuals over a long period of time. Considering my desire to study abroad and volunteer or work in the education field, all those experiences will prove invaluable in the future. But on a more fundamental level, PA has provided me with a more basic experience that I have not explicitly had before, that of working in a moral and public philosophical context.

In academia, beyond issues of academic honesty, rarely are students pushed to think about the ethical considerations of their actions and activities and about the questions of how they should engage others in interaction. Our treatment of our peers is understood in terms of getting along or achieving academic goals, rather than in terms of uplifting or empowering them in order to make the world a better place. In fact, education and college are typically set forward to students as self-serving ventures for which the ultimate goal is a better life for you, the participant and the student. While on a certain level I appreciate being treated as an individual and being regarded by the merits of my own work--after all, group projects in classes drive me nuts!!!--I think that such an individualistic focus has troubling implications, leaving us unprepared to deal and interact with others at best, and at worst belittling and disparaging the contributions of others in life. Morality ultimately is a question of how one should act towards and around others, whether the impetus of that "should" is utilitarian, divine, or logical. But unfortunately moral questions are dealt with tangentially in education if at all, leaving their exploration to church, home, and the extreme cases, the law. Simultaneously, questions of meaning, purpose, reality, existence, and knowledge are treated in secondary detail to questions of grammar and addition.

I suppose I should feel fortunate that no one has ever told me how I should live my life, but by having the absence of such instruction or at the very least exposure to such questions beyond the rare English or Philosophy class, we as a society are encouraging our youth to avoid those questions, not challenge the status quo, and accept the traditional patterns of life. And if they reject that, we are encouraging them to rebellion, rather than engagement with their peers and elders to construct a new vision of how the world should be.

Public Achievement provides an opportunity for high school and middle school students to engage in questions of how the world should be, which leads both them and the coaches to question how they should act, considering that our social world is constructed by our combined actions.

A Mad Tea Party Part II

Our year of Public Achievement came to a close officially two Fridays ago when the students put on their project during lunch at Manual High School. Only Fransheska and I were able to go in early to help the students set up, but a team lead from another school, Laura, was able to join us and provide valuable help as well. Anita, Sarah, and our boss Cara came later. At first, we had a hard time finding students and were unsure where we should begin setting up, but then Fransheska was able to find some of our students and then jumped in as we set up two tables to hand out cake and pop and hold the raffle. We set up the Drug Free banner and several of the students immediately volunteered to videotape, while more and more students kept showing up to help. I felt like I had nothing to do at times, because everything was being taken care off.

In short, the project was a great success, a success driven by student efforts and coach determination, even though this whole year we were uncertain if it could happen, because we were constantly facing difficulties in organizing and motivating our students. But when it came down to the end, they were there for us, and I felt so proud of them! After chaos, came peace. So the mad tea party turned out not to be so mad after all, though we did serve 120 plus students three giant cakes, while they signed the banner to commit at least in theory to being drug free. They also made 55 short video clips which will be combined and edited into a single video that can be given to Manual administrators to use in the future. While I am doubtful that our project will cause a paradigm shift in how drugs affect Manual high school, at least our project put the issue back on the radar for students. And I am confident that what the students have gained from the year is far greater than what they might have gained in this final project. The capabilities, skills, knowledge, and awareness to come together through all the steps leading up to the project will serve them well in the future.

Sorry to any readers that come across this post for it being so short and dull, but I have decided to fit my closing thoughts in one more post that should come out this Thursday! さようなら-Sayoonara!

A Mad Tea Party Part I

Today we begin a two day marathon of PA events, first the PA Summit and then our last PA day at Manual where we are implementing our project. The PA Summit brings our PA students to the University of Denver to meet other students from other schools and celebrate the various different projects that each group are working on. Hopefully, our students from Manual will actually be able to come and participate in this event and meet the other students from KIPP and South High Schools. The exciting part about the Summit, is that it will expose the students to some of the opportunities of higher education that are available to them. They will learn about normal things like college food, dorms, and life, but also will encounter a culture of empowerment and privilege vastly different from at least Manual High School. That is not the say that these students should be pulled away from a high school environment and want to rush off to college, as many aspects of our college campus are sickly sweet, naive, and indicative of an unequal privilege in society, of a fragmentation of America by class, culture, race, heritage, and circumstances, and a hundred other different divisors. But college, fundamentally, is a place of opportunity and as I mentioned before empowerment where students from any background can develop an awareness of how they can change the world. College is a place where the empowerment we talk about in Public Achievement is visibly demonstrated. Hopefully, the Summit will provide the students with a chance to see that.

Before the Tea Party

This last Thursday, Fransheska, my fellow coach, and Sarah, our team lead met with our PA students and began hammering out the details of our project and the grant proposal for funding. On Friday, we worked out the rest of the details with the students and had them type up the grant proposal so we could submit the project. This was accomplished by only a handful of the students as many others were involved in planning and preparing for their Prom. The students chose to incorporate several elements that they had thought about previously into one project, by hosting a booth in their lobby to attract students to participate in a student video where each student could tell why they did not do drugs or provide other testimonies about how and why drugs affect students at Manual High School. This event will take place on Friday, May 11 and will feature food and decorations in addition to the video and the table.

So far I have been merely descriptive of our students' plans. I guess, that this is in part because I feel an immense sense of relief to have a project, a singular goal, after weeks of feeling constantly disorganized and behind schedule. It is a good feeling to have, even though I wrote last week about the process being more important than the project. Why? Well... I believe that having a project, gives the students something to engage in and work toward. In the long run, the greatest benefit comes to the students from the skills that they gain and the confidence they earn about changing and affecting things around them, but in the short run they need something to rally around, something to accomplish.

There is a great tension in life between the here and now and the far-off future, between preparing in the long term and living in the moment. At a young age, we live in the moment, unconcerned about the future beyond what will I do for fun today. Part of our education within primary and secondary school, is to learn about preparing for the future, about giving future days the same weight of importance that we give today and tomorrow. We learn of the consequences of sacrificing tomorrow for today, of the need for moderation, of how to live in a sustainable manner, emotionally and socially. As we age, we are continually reminded of these lessons, but there is an urge to return to the carefree moments of childhood, when we do not have to plan or prepare, but can just be, be ourselves, be anyone we wanted to be. Simultaneously, we learn of the rewards of a long term investment, of the benefits of preparation, though it is a subtler lesson, one easily missed amid the chaos.

Political goals, changes in the dynamics of power, and realizations of equality can not be achieved in the short term. Real change takes time. But it must be organized through the day to day actions of committed individuals, by the exercise of power here and there, steadily building toward a larger goal. But the balance between now and later carries significant risks and dangers, two of which I will elucidate here. One, we can get caught in the form, in the day to day gathering of forces and proclaiming of goals, in the politicking. It seems our politicians are often captured in this track. The form favors the moment, the rhetoric and the emotion, but sacrifices the substance and the tangible change that can benefit a community. The form is mobilizing, rallying, striking, and when the day is done, shifting back into the comfortable patterns of life. The second danger, is that of being consumed by the substance, by the ideas and plans for the future, for a better world. When we become wrapped up in the substance, we become armchair philosophers, who forget to take the steps to enact change, who make themselves impotent by caution, and sacrifice the form and the moment for dreams and wistful imaginings. I feel that many visionaries do just this and fail to share their ideas for change with the world. The Public Achievement Program is also prone to the second error, but makes that sacrifice with the hope that it can empower students and coaches in the future by providing them with a foundation of skills, confidence, and awareness about their own ability to make change. But ultimately, balancing between the two extremes is best.

And that is why the project at the end is important. It reminds the students of the importance of the moment, of accomplishments. It gives the students a place to anchor what they have learned in their memory. And when we can transfer the present to the past and use it as a foundation to build our new world, then neither present nor future need be sacrificed.

As for the Mad Tea Party? That comes this Friday!

A Caucus Race and A Long Tale

After our Community Panel, the main task facing our group of students is identifying exactly what project they want to work on. The community panelists provided several recommendations on the ideas that the students presented, but our group is running out of time to plan and implement any project. Our time was shortened even more when our PA coaches went to MHS this last Friday and found that our students had the rest of the day off. Fortunately we ran into a few of our students and were able to give them some instructions for what to do during the week to prepare for the next two Fridays, our last two Fridays to meet with them before most of our students graduate! It is crazy to think that all of our time with the students at Manual has boiled done to two short days of 43 minute periods to finish our project.

From the start of my involvement in the Public Achievement program at DU in the fall of last year, my supervisors and other PA coaches have told me that the process of PA is more important than the result. They have said that it is more important to provide the students with an awareness about what they can do, then to actually conduct a fantastic project. When we are down to the last two weeks, with no idea still about what our project will be, it is hard to feel as if the process is more important than the result. It is hard not to feel as if our efforts have been somewhat incomplete and that we have only grazed the surface of the potential of our students.

In Alice in Wonderland, after Alice exits the pool of tears with a slew of various animals, they hold a race. This caucus race has no start or finish, and everyone begins and stops at their own initiative. It is easy to claim that such a race, with no obvious goal is meaningless. After all, why race if you cannot win? But the whole incident has another purpose altogether. The animals and Alice just emerged soaking from the pool of tears and the race provides them a way to dry off. I believe for PA the difference between process and project is much the same. While everyone likes to win the race or complete the project, maybe our real goal should be just to dry off and to step into the world with new clear eyes. So just what does the drying off equate to in PA? What benefit do we get from running without there being a finish line?

These questions strike at the purpose of Public Achievement and the goal of attempting to develop political relationships in a non-hierarchical structure. On one hand, our awareness as college students of our own ability to build up our community and engage in public democracy building should encourage within our students a similar awareness. In another sense, the process of building and organizing a community provides the students with a template that they can apply to their future engagements with politics in their communities. In this, learning the process of putting together a project is as important as the project, because the project itself cannot and should not be replicated in other circumstances exactly, but the process can. The process and all the skills associated with it become the empowering force that provide the PA students with both awareness and individual power to make tangible change in their communities, whether that change occurs today or ten years from now.

Prioritizing the capabilities earned over the singular goals accomplished seems to me to be a revolutionary departure from the usual trend in our society. We provide ribbons and awards through all of primary and secondary school and continue the race into college and our careers, constantly competing with one another for status, recognition, and glory. I watch college students in classes, whose sole purpose is to receive a grade to gain a degree to get a job to have what they want in life, never caring much for the what they actually learn, what skills they actually gain, and what power actually becomes invested in them. I even find myself doing the same at times, running the race for the finish line, rather than for the journey. But ultimately the consequence of living that way, of being solely goal-oriented instead of balanced between accomplishing goals and gaining capabilities, is that our life becomes dependent on the races, and we determine success by where we finish.

But can we live another way? Even when we devote time to developing capabilities and awareness, are we not doomed to reenter the flow of competition, to bend our will to achieve our interests and to beat out our competitors? Here is where I feel the PA model fails to escape tradition. After all, it is based around the self-interest of the participating individuals and when self-interests do not coincide then there is little incentive to work together. The PA model misses out on the unconditional aspects of friendship and advocates a solely political relationship between coach and student, though I doubt that in practice the relationships ever turn out so clearly cut one way or another.

I have never been a fan of communitarian ideals when they are forced on a group, but nevertheless I believe that the greatest thing we as humans can do is to unconditionally invest ourselves in the building up and empowering of other human beings. This is the primary reason why I admire teachers and one day hope to teach at the college level. But as to how to spread those values without force, while allowing each individual to still enjoy the individual freedoms that are the cherished heritage of this society and expanding upon the equality among groups in enjoying those freedoms, I have no answer now. Ultimately, I can thank the PA process and experience for awakening these questions and thoughts within me, even as I agonize over what shape these final few weeks will take.

The Pool of Tears

As I am sure you (the reader) have noticed, my post titles make allusions to Lewis Carroll's work "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." That work, along with its companion "Through the Looking Glass" have fundamentally framed my understanding of the absurd, of making sense out of nonsense. As such, I draw on them heavily to understand situations and events outside my normal realm of experience and considering the degree to which my PA experience at Manual has been well outside the 'realm of normal,' I feel that Alice's adventures provide a nice parallel to my own. As I will continue to use allusions to those works in further posts, feel free to ask me about the connections in the comments section, though at times I will make them explicit within the post itself.

The Pool of Tears is literally a pool of tears formed by Alice's crying. In the particular section of the book that the pool is created, Alice is going through a period of rapid shrinking and growth inspired by a series of cakes and small drinks that respectively are labelled "eat me" and "drink me" as she struggles to find a way through a door into a garden in Wonderland. After eating a cake that causes her to grow to "nine feet high," her tears leave a pool that covers a significant part of the hall in the White Rabbit's House. While "nine feet high" the tears are inconsequential, but when Alice shrinks again, they become much more significant. In the pool of tears, Alice has her first encounter with a rather tremulous mouse, along with various other denizens of Wonderland.

This last Friday, our Public Achievement group presented to a community panel. The presentation is designed to give the PA students a chance to articulate their thoughts, plans, and ideas for their PA project. Then the panel can provide them with feedback on the viability and feasibility of the project, suggestions on how to improve, and information on potential community partnerships. While the panel did provide some of these things for our students, it was hampered by a series of factors. First of all, due to a multitude of reasons, our students had not picked a single project idea and had a series of ideas that they were willing to put forward to the panel, but no one concrete idea on which the panelists could latch on. Secondly, the students were not prepared to present to the panel in the first place. While we had worked on ideas to present to the panel during the week and had sent the students a power point outline and other resources during the week prior to the panel, they had not taken any time to work on their presentation and in this sense, came in cold and unready. Nevertheless, they went ahead and presented their issue (drugs and their affect on the school), their research, and their project ideas, quite effectively. Even though two students dominated the conversation, many others contributed, even a few that we had not seen in a while in addition to a student that has never showed up to our PA classes before. But just as when Alice's transformations in size had unintended consequences for the rest of her adventures, I wonder what pool of tears has been left by our students having to mature in their ideas in such a public and emotional manner.

The students were brutally honest in sharing some of their own experiences with drugs, and while I value such honesty, I understand that that such investment requires a significant level of emotional involvement. For those students that have not been there from a while, I question if they will have the commitment to come back for the less formal task of implementing a project. For those that have been committed throughout our journey, I am simply grateful and feel a need to make the last few weeks of PA worthwhile for them. But throughout these weeks, what is the 'pool of tears' that we have left, that we might slip into when we come back to earth? Might it be the dreams and ideas that they poured out at the panel, that we have to find a way to channel into a single concrete project? Might it be the emotions that they have previously kept veiled from us, their coaches? Might it be the expectations that come from such a formal situation? While I have no answers for these questions, I am confident that the 'pool of tears' where ever we might encounter it will be another essential part of the journey for our students, something to traverse, somewhere to meet new people, solidify old relationships, and potentially make new ones. So I leave you, my reader, with hope.