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.

Down the Rabbit Hole Part II

When we came back after winter break we were given the opportunity to have our PA day during the last period of the Friday school day during a student leadership class for juniors and seniors. While the new semester brought stability in terms of giving us a set time and place to meet with the students, it did not solve all our problems related to student attendance or miscommunication between us and the school. The first PA day of the year solidified this reality in our mind when our contact at the school gave us another project to work on with the students outside of the lesson plan that we had prepared for the students. While we actually were able to accomplish something in that day in terms of helping the students put together a proposal for off campus lunch, it disrupted the flow of our planning and my own confidence even though it later days we were able to return to fully controlling our use of the time. A further difficulty came when Christi announced that she would not be able to continue coaching with us.

As the days of January and February passed a greater challenge emerged out of the gap between the capabilities and understanding of our students and the theoretical knowledge we attempted to provide in our lessons. They never fully bought into the PA language of self-interest, identity, and oppression that we utilized and seemed to long for something more tangible. Nor did they buy in to the variety of activities and methods by which we attempted to bring the knowledge to bear, I believe in part because they were doubtful of the meaningfulness within our plans and in part because they believed we were holding them back. There was likely a serious incongruity between the experiences they had week to week in their normal leadership classes versus our hour with them on Friday. The students did not communicate their feelings to us, though, and responded to the circumstances by not showing up to classes or being less than serious when they were in the classroom. As a result, we found it increasingly difficult to accomplish anything in our lesson plans. Simultaneously, we were spending too much time on the early stages of PA.

We dealt with the circumstances by taking one week to have a heart to heart discussion with the students about expectations and respect before leaping into the selection of an issue to work on. I am not completely sure which aspect did the trick, but for a while there was a significant attitude change in the classroom. We selected an issue--how the use of drugs by students affected their attendance, academic achievement, and graduation--and beginning conducting research. This research process was disrupted by a series of conflicts with the senior schedule ranging from their spring break, to senior ditch day, to sports, to community events that required the participation of the student leadership to set up. Nevertheless, the students were able to conduct a series of interviews with school administration and gather student information through a survey. Both research activities were very successful in gathering information, and though the students as of yet do not have a way to apply that information, they at least seem excited about the possibilities.

And this brings us to the present day, where this Friday the students will present their plans and research to a community panel from which they could potentially receive advice or assistance in moving their project forward. Because of the chaos that is Manual, we do not know for sure if the students will be prepared or if they will even show up. But we have given them an outline through a power point, provided them with the data from their surveys and links to their videos, given them advice, and pushed them out of the nest and off the cliff. Now, we only hope that they can fly.

Down the Rabbit Hole Part I

As a brief summary of the purpose of this blog and the following post: I have been meaning to blog about my experiences in college since I graduated from high school as a way to reflect about them. However, I have previously lacked the impetus and motivation to begin and continue such a blog. Now, I have both. For the past six months, I have been working within the University of Denver's Public Achievement program which is coordinated by the Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning (CCESL). The Public Achievement program connects college coaches with high school or middle school students to work through the framework of Public Achievement to make tangible change in those students communities. Often this change comes in form of working on social justice issues or bringing programs and services into the schools that were formerly absent. The Public Achievement (PA) framework is based on models of community organizing that rose out of the work of Saul Alinsky and others from the Midwest and East Coast. Community organizing as opposed to activism works on empowering communities to make the changes they desire rather than simply mobilizing raw support for a cause.

My involvement in the PA program at the University of Denver has radically changed my perspective on what politics can mean while simultaneously unearthing doubts that I have about the democratic nature of the United States, the capability of everyone to engage fully in politics, and the social ramifications of the forming of purely political relationships. There is no doubt in my mind that my political understanding has undergone a metamorphosis, but I am unsure of the extent and nature of the change. Unraveling the meaning of my PA experience and finding the nuggets of certainty within it all that I can grasp a hold of will take quite some time. As I undertake that introspective journey I hope to record some small piece of my experience and contemplation here. To begin, I will provide a brief narrative of that experience so far.

At the start of my sophomore year of college, I faced a search to find a work study job on campus. The previous year, I had worked in a psychology lab as a research assistant, but as I had decided I did not want to be a psychologist I declined my supervisor's offer to return to the lab the next year. Instead, I searched for a job related to my newly decided upon majors of international studies and geography, or failing in that, one within the library or in some process of education. I had heard about the work of CCESL and the PA program from my friend, Anita (see her blog here http://neetachange.blogspot.com/) and decided to apply for a tutoring position within the Center. I was called in for an interview within the week and during my interview, the former coordinator of the PA program convinced me that I should work as a PA coach rather than as a tutor. Anita had beguiled me of the wonders, challenges, and benefits of working with high school students in the program and though I had doubts about my own capabilities, I acquiesced. Within two weeks we had our first training which introduced me to the community organizing model, followed by a retreat for PA coaches to provide us a crash course in our duties and responsibilities for the PA program.

The University of Denver PA program had partnerships with three local high schools for the 2011-2012 school year: South, KIPP, and Manual. Each school had a team lead or two, a graduate student to work with school officials and coordinate the coaching groups. I was placed in the Manual coaching group with Christi, Fransheska, and Anita. Our team lead's name is Sarah. The PA programs go into the schools on Fridays to work with the students for approximately an hour on a lesson plan within one of the PA model's four stages, briefly, building relationships, identifying issues, conducting community research, and implementing a project/program to deal with the issue (problem) identified and researched. Our start date was October 14th, but the coordination with the school did not work out and the official date was moved to the 21st, when I would be gone for a Model UN competition in Washington DC. Our contact at the school did encourage us to come in prior to the starting date to meet the students, which we did, though almost none of the students we met ended up coming regularly to our PA days.

Those first few days of PA were a journey through a real-life performance of the theater of the absurd. Our PA program was set as an after school program which students had to voluntarily come to when normally the program works through a during school time slot. As a result of the after school timing, we never were certain which students would be coming to the program nor where we would be at. Some days we would have 12 students, other days we would have 2. Some days we would be in a large room with space for activities and others we would be crammed into an office space within a single table and barely any chairs. The chaotic nature of the onsite circumstances led us to give Manual the nickname Narnia, as we never knew where we would be or what we would do once we stepped through the wardrobe. Poor communication and the circumstances of our situation prevented us from accomplishing anything tangible outside getting to know some of the students until after the end of the semester when we switched to an in-school time slot.

To be Continued...