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.