My life lately...

Since when is not posting on a blog for a while grounds for death threats? ….Ashley.

My life right now consists of me trying desperately all week long to figure out how to be a teacher to wild and crazy inner-city middle schoolers and trying desperately all weekend long to forget about the fact that I am a teacher.

It is funny because I refer to my students as my kids when I talk about them, so people who overhear must think I am going crazy as a mother. Among "my kids" I have: 5 who are totally illiterate, 3 who got arrested on Halloween for throwing eggs at a cop car, 1 who is deaf and mute, 10 who have had less than three years of formal education, 1 who was a street kid in the Dominican Republic from age 7 to age 12 running drugs between dealers and users for food money, 1 with unmedicated ADHD, 1 who got expelled from his last school for beating up his teacher, none who are above a third grade reading level (it goes downhill from there), about twenty who apparently cannot hear my voice (especially when my voice is saying things like "sit down, be quiet or do your work"), 15 who get in fights regularly, less than 10 who are living with the person who raised them and over 100 who go to ridiculous lengths to get attention.

So that is what occupies my time and thoughts during the week. Below are some photos I got off my friends camera that show you how I try to fill up my weekends with non-school related stuff.

Every year there is a huge New York City Area singles dance on Roosevelt Island at the lighthouse. You take the tram over from Manhattan and it is absolutely beautiful. There is an awesome view of the city from there. This is me and my roommate Soo.


Mormon night at the Mets. Me, my roommate Cristi and Brittany. The missionaries sing the national anthem and we all sit in the same section and socialize while the Mets lose. Good times had by all.
Cristi bought an antique table off of Craig's list so we started making dinner every Sunday night and inviting people over for a real live dinner around a real live table. Dinner tables are something of a novelty in New York so people go nuts over them. I decided I wanted to start learning how to cook so it is a lot of fun to have people over to test it out on. As it turns out though, our family was not very formal growing up. Cristi is horrified that I put the bottle of salad dressing on the table.
All I have to say about dinner parties is, thank goodness for Laura. I have called her at least 20 times since I got back from China to get recipes or dinner ideas and they are always a big hit. One time I called and said, I have people coming in 30 minutes give me something fast and easy and she totally pulled through. THANK YOU LAURA!!!

The Saturday before Halloween we went to Sleepy Hollow to the Old Dutch Church to attend the reading of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." They have an actor read it at the church and they serve hot apple cider. During intermission we went wandering around the creepy old cemetery that is right next to the church. It was dark and creepy, a perfect Halloween activity.

Sometimes when you live in a city that has nothing but tall concrete buildings and people living on top of one another it is therapeutic to get out. The leaves are changing and the northeast is beautiful so we went to Connecticut to a regional singles activity on this guy's property. It was magnificent and a much needed break from crazy NYC.
Every year since I moved to NYC I have LOVED Marathon Sunday. I always watch it in Harlem which is at mile 21 and people are just dying. This year I watched and cheered for 4 hours because I had three friends running. We went to church and then walked straight over so that is why I am dressed all Church-like.
Cristi and I got home from school on Tuesday and Cristi got a call from a friend who builds sets on Broadway offering two tickets to "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," so we jumped on the train and made it just in time. During my time in NYC I have seen tons of Broadway shows but I still love them to pieces. This one had an audience full of kids and the Grinch was fantastic. A definite perk to the city.

I'm Alive, I'm just a new teacher

So I get the picture, I have been negligent and have not been updating my blog nor keeping people informed about what I am up to. The truth is, your first month plus of teaching in an inner-city school with virtually no training and involving students, who, through a few of lifes cruel tricks have been left incredibly needy and lacking in all forms of discipline feels a little like drowning while a big mean lady named “The no child left behind act” is beating you about the head with a broom. Fortunately I survived, although not totally unscathed. I see many huge blaring problems with the New York City Department of Ed that I believe are holding the students of this great city back more than they already do.

First I will give you an overview of my life since Girls Camp. Becky Jorgenson came out and visited. We had fun running around and seeing all of New York. We even did a few things that I had never done before including going to the top of the Empire State Building and watching the sunrise from the Brooklyn Bridge. Becky and I haven’t hung out much since we were little kids so it was really interesting. I think she is awesome and it she is just incredibly easy to be around. I don’t know whether to attribute that to the fact that she is a Californian or the product of Proctor genes.


I have been doing a lot and keeping really busy but all the other activities seem secondary to the rather monumental entrance into the wild and weird world of New York City Public education. I teach at a middle school in a neighborhood called Washington Heights. The neighborhood is quite sketchy despite the fact that it lies in the shadows of the world famous Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and Research Center. My school is on the third and fourth floors of an old four-story building with no air conditioning; the first and second floors are used by another middle school. I teach ESL so I work mainly with immigrant kids but there are a few kids in there who were born into Spanish speaking homes in the US and for one reason or another, have not learned English during their 7 plus years of American public school education. Often that reason is that they need special education but their parents are unwilling to accept that label. About 98% of my students are from the Dominican Republic and then I have one from El Salvador and about three from Mexico. I teach a 6th grade, a 7th grade and an 8th grade class. These are called the bilingual classes, which means they get math, science and social studies in Spanish, they have a Spanish literature class and they get an ESL class. This is the class that all new students get sent to and left there until they learn sufficient English to move on. Problem: they have NO motivation to learn English. They come from a Spanish speaking home in a Spanish speaking community and go to a classroom full of Spanish speaking students with a Spanish speaking teacher. Their exposure to English is….me, three times a week. The result, they see English as a foreign language and have very little interest in learning it. That said, there are a few AWESOME students who really put in a lot of effort and if they try, they can move to a proficient enough level in a year or a little more.

Behavior: So most of my summer training was focused on classroom management because inner-city schools are notorious for being unruly and in an unruly classroom, it doesn’t matter how great the material is, the students learn nothing. One of my professors told us in his thick Long Island Jewish accent, “Neva let the lunatics have time to organize, if ya do, you are two minutes away from bein fired out the winda.” He also advised us to make the students believe that we were always on the brink of killing one of them. That element of fear might keep them in their seat long enough to learn something. Armed with that advice I tried to take control of a classroom. The problem is this, in the DR school is voluntary and is only about 4 hours a day. So, many of these kids have very limited formal schooling. They only attended school when and if they wanted. They are not used to having to sit still for this long and they certainly resent the fact that they are forced to go to school. If they acted up in their old schools they got kicked out of school. So we have lots of kids who are not only behavior problems, but also lack several years of schooling so they are illiterate in Spanish. I find that for the first few months the students are fairly respectful, and quiet. Then they start to realize that they will not be kicked out or beaten if they act up. They start to realize the powerlessness of their teachers. The ultimate punishment for any crazy thing they choose to do is one hour of detention. Where they sit in a classroom with all the other hooligans and talk and make fun of each other and the teacher. When they realize that nobody can do anything to them and nobody can force them to do anything they go nuts. They test all their limits. You give them detention and they just walk out because they realize you can’t physically restrain them. Their parents are not educated and don’t really care about their kid’s education. They see school as a holding cell. You call a parent and say, “Your child is out of control” and they usually say, “Yeah I know, I can’t control them either, they are just bad. You can keep them for detention as long as you want.”

That being said, I do believe that I can make a difference by giving those kids who want something more than welfare and projects in their futures the opportunity to make that decision for themselves and it is this thought and hope that makes me enjoy my job, that makes me get up and get to work with a smile on my face. Despite the difficulties (and I have only told you a very small fraction of them) I like being a teacher still, although I reserve the right to change my mind.

Girls Camp

I got home from DC and immediately left to go to girls camp with the Manhattan stake. I had so much fun! Girls camp was certainly an eye-opening experience and unlike any girls camp I have ever been to. Like almost everything in this stake it was run mostly by young single adults with a few married women sprinkled here and there. We go to a BEAUTIFUL place called Camp Liahona that the church owns about two hours north of the city by train. The teenagers in the Manhattan stake are, for the most part, typical “inner-city youth.” Raised in the projects, have never left New York City and don’t have most of the experiences that I had growing up. Of the 45 girls at girls camp, 3 knew how to swim (and not very well), 2 were white, they were all petrified of bugs and would SCREAM!!!! I kept telling them, “girls, there are rats and cockroaches ALL over the city including in your classrooms, how can you be scared of that tiny bug?” They told me that they prefer large city rats any day over a spider or bug.

We had a huge beautiful lake with green trees all around it and a lifeguard who was an LDS 16-year old boy whom ALL the girls inevitably fell in love with and flirted with and wrote letters to. The sad part about the lake is that only 3 girls knew how to swim. Most of the girls just stayed waded in and layed around in the area that was about two feet deep. Another leader and I were trying to teach them how to swim, but I realized that just because you know how to do something, doesn’t mean you know how to teach it.

The Canoes: The church owns about 16 canoes for the lake but the rule was that if anyone wanted to go in the canoes they had to pass a swimming test. The girls begged the lifeguard until he finally said that anyone could go as long as they had a life jacket. So a few of the leaders started taking the girls out for VERY short rides that totally freaked them out. The were scared out of their minds to be out in the middle of “deep” water. I imagine it is the same scared feeling that people get the first time they ride a roller coaster. I took a bunch of girls out, having very limited canoe experience but plenty of raft experience to guide and row. The last pair of girls were both non-swimmers and one was VERY freaked out and a big girl. She sat on the floor in the middle of the canoe because she was scared so we were riding pretty low. One time when the canoe rocked a little (as canoes are apt to do) she grabbed the sides and over-corrected. Water came rushing in and the canoe flipped. Both girls flipped out and clung to the canoe, screaming for their life. Keep in mind, we all had very good lifejackets on, we were within the sight of the lifeguard, there was another canoe from camp out in the water and I was there, nevertheless these girls were certain that they would die. I had to pry their hands of the canoe that kept pushing them under giving them an opportunity to swallow water and have that drowning sensation so they started clinging to me. I kept repeating, “your life vest is holding you up. You are going to be fine, just relax.” Instead they were dead set on drowning and swallowing water and panicking. So I grabbed them both around the waist and had all three of us lay on our backs with a girl on either side of me and I kicked us to the shore behind us with the girls breaking every bone in my hand and making promises for “If I ever get out of this alive….” the whole way to the shore. We reached the shore I loaded the two girls onto the other canoe and sent them back to the dock and then the lifeguard came out to help me tip the canoe a bring it back in. I arrived back and all the girls flocked around me wanting to know if the lifeguard “had said anything about (them),” and wanting to know every detail of all that we had discussed.

We had testimony meeting and it was just amazing to hear a little about the lives of these girls. They struggle with such serious problems. I kept thinking, these girls are so scared of water and bugs and most of the girls from my home town and Utah would think it is crazy to be scared of water but if any of those girls even had to spend one night in the life of most of these girls they would die of fright. These are the girls who see a constant stream of sex, violence, drugs and crime and think it is normal. I loved getting to know them better and seeing how the principles of the gospel give them hope is what is truly a hopeless world.

Us waiting for the train on the platform.


We got on the train to come home and the girls were exhausted but were so comforted to see big buildings again.

Conclusion: Teenage girls are crazy.

DC with Nikki

So a couple of weekends ago I finally made it down to DC. It is only 4 hours away from here but I had never made it. I went mainly to see Nikki Madsen, who lives there now and to attend my friends reception but ended up falling in love with that amazing, sparkling clean city.

I got there on Thursday night and Nikki proved yet again to be the most phenomenal hostess. She had an entire itinerary planned and printed for me, complete with all the information that I would need. So with Nikki's detailed plan in hand I went out to discover DC.
This is me in front of the capital building. I took the tour and was impressed, then I went to the supreme court and then on to the Library of Congress where I went on a guided tour and again developed a bit of a crush on my tour guide. I have discovered a bit of a weakness in myself for quirky tour guides. I find their knowledge of the most random things fascinating and love following them around.

I learned several things in DC.
1) With all the photographing incompetents roaming around major tourist sights, it is best to become a master of the "self-photograph" if you intend to travel solo.
2) DC is so clean and bright it reminded me of Disneyland. I kept expecting Goofy to come sauntering around the corner, broom in hand to keep the area shiny clean. There was certainly no peeing on the sides of buildings and no chicken bones on the streets. Perhaps only someone who lives in New York can appreciate the phenomenon that it is that a city the size of DC can be clean.
3) DC has a totally different feel than New York. I decided that the purposes of DC and New York are different. DC is designed to inspire awe and admiration to the visitor. It is set up to show everything that is good about being American. New York's purpose is to inspire fear and intimidation in the visitor as it attempts to dominate you financially, either through legal albeit somewhat unethical means or through the more direct way of although still somewhat unethical method of street muggings.
4)Life is cheaper, cleaner, prettier and overall easier in DC, but for some reason I belong in NYC.
Nikki met me on her lunch break and took me to the White House to take a peak. Then I went and saw the theater where Lincoln was shot and the house where he died. Then I went to the archives and saw all the stuff there including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Then I went over to the Air and Space Museum because Nikki told me I should check out the temporary American History exhibit there and look what I found....
The Nauvoo temple stone!

Saturday Nikki and I and a couple of her friends got in her car (oh what a luxury to have a car) and went up into the gorgeous hills to see the trees.
We went to these caves that were amazing and since it was their anniversary they were being lit up by candles which made them even more beautiful.
That night my roommate Cristi came and Nikki lent us her car (she is truly a saint) so that we could go to our friend's reception in Annapolis, Maryland. That town is charming and so pretty. I was in awe the whole weekend and what a beautiful life some people lead. Sunday we went to church in Nikki's huge singles ward that was full of well educated, refined, globally minded people. I was stunned. Then that night we went on a tour of the monuments. I loved them all.
This is me and my roommate Cristi on the steps of the Lincoln monument looking out over the Washington monument and the WWII monument. My favorite though, was the Korean War Monument. We saw it at night when it was dark and quiet and it is a bunch of larger than life sized statues of soldiers with all their gear on walking through the plants. This caused a much more emotional reaction in me because all I could think about were these poor guys wandering through a strange country far away from family in bad weather, at night and in reality they were just waiting for the enemy to come out and attack them. What a scary way to live, as a target. I am so grateful for the soldiers, for all the amazing leaders this country has had and for the opportunity to live in a country that, I believe, has the best interests of its citizens at heart.

I'm Still Alive

So I got back to NYC on June 16th after going to dinner and Karaoke with my friends in Beijing. At Karaoke I sang the New York song that says "I want to wake up in the city that doesn't sleep" and I actually got on a plane and woke up in NYC. It was cool.

I went back to my ward and it felt like coming home. Many of my friends were still here and it has been a lot of fun to see them all again. I went immediately back to my temple shift, Saturday mornings at 5:00 am and I was called as the Spanish trainer for the session. Within the first two weeks at church I was asked to come up and give an impromptu testimony, asked to speak and given a calling as Relief Society Teacher. Looks like I didn't miss a beat.

I started training on June 18 to be an ESL teacher. The schedule was grueling. I taught middle school ESL for 4 hours in the morning every day, then went to school for a four hour class for my Masters degree, then I went to a special training program. The summer school that I taught at offered me a job for the fall so I will be teaching Beginning level ESL students at MS 326 starting Sept. 3rd. It has been fascinating and I will definitely tell you more about what it is like to teach students who have such limited life experience in NYC's inner-city public schools.

So now for some pictures....

My friend Seth asked my friend Amy to make this shirt for him to surprise me. It was hilarious!

I went with a group of friends up to Niagara Falls again.


This time we went to the base of the falls and danced under the spray. We got soaked but it was AWESOME!!!

We went to palmyra and saw the temple and the Sacred Grove. I love those places.

Then we say the Hill Cumorah Pageant. This pageant is really rather amazing. Nothing like the Manti temple pageant. This one is a BIG deal and very well done. Check out the sets and how huge the cast is.


My training ended and in August all I had to do was find a new apartment. I scoured the city and saw some of the most frightening excuses for an apartment that I have ever seen being rented for thousands of dollars a month. Luckily we found this one just one block down on our same street. It is a NYC historic landmark called Astor Row and it is the only place in NYC with a porch and front and back gardens. We move in August 18th.

I am heading to DC to visit Nikki Madsen tomorrow and then I will be goint to girls camp with the stake next week.

Wrap-up

So I have been avoiding posting because I didn't have any time to write, but then I realized that in the Allred Blogging world everyone is more interested in the pictures than anything else anyways.
So here is my recent life in pictures...

About a month ago I went on a field trip to the zoo with all 250 of my students. I stood in front of each animal and said its name and asked questions like, "What color is it? How many legs does it have? What is it doing? etc. " Apparently it was a rare event to have a foreign teacher at the zoo because we got quite the following. People would just follow me around and repeat my English. This is me and some of them in front of the panda.



The last weekend in May, five girls from the branch and I got on a train and headed to Xi'an to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. The train ride was like a slumber party and after some clever flirting with the cook we were invited to the dining car for free soup for breakfast.


The Terra Cotta Warriors were discovered by a Chinese peasant in the early 1970's while he was digging a well. An emporer in ancient China had them made to protect his tomb. It was like China's answer to the pyramids and quite impressive. They are still unearthing them. They have barely scratched the surface and the sight has been called the 8th wonder of the world.


At 4:30am (sunrise) they raise the Chinese flag over Tiananmen Square. It is a very significant experience for a Chinese person to attend. So I, in an effort to be Chinese, left my house at 3:30 in a taxi to have the experience. It was the quintessential Chinese moment, complete with crowds, bad smells, spitting and unexplanable patriotism. Other than that, the flag raising was pretty normal and uneventful but I do feel in some way, so much more Chinese.

That night 44 LDS Young Single Adults from around China climbed in a bunch of mini vans and headed for the Great Wall. We hiked for about an hour to the wall and up to one of the guard towers where we built a fire and had roast duck and chicken and spent the night. It was awesome!! Although there were parts of the wall that were so steep they made you want to die a little bit.

Me on the wall on the way back home. It was very misty and gave the wall a mysterious feeling but ruined the photo opps.





After getting back from the great wall a couple of friends and I went to Wanfujing (like Bejing's Time Square) for a culinary adventure...Chinese Style. This is me with a giant scorpion in my mouth. It was fried and not all that bad, not nearly as bad as the grasshopper, which I also ate but worse than the seahorse.
Last weekend I went to see the Forbidden City since I had not been there yet and it was cool but a lot of it was covered for reconstruction. I also got to go see the spot where China was dedicated for the preaching of the gospel.


That night I met up with some friends and went to a famous teahouse We are all Mormon so we had hot water instead of tea. I have actually become a big fan of a nice cup of hot water. This teahouse had all of the traditional Chinese entertainment including Chinese Opera, singing, a kung fu demonstration, shadow puppets, Chinese acrobats, and presentation of Bian Lian or Changing Faces. A man (pictured below) is a kind of magician and changes masks very fast without using his hands. I can't figure out how and he even let me look at his cape and hat.


I am wrapping up the last week of school and am spending all of my free time rehearsing for the big English Show on June 14th. It is my worst nightmare come true. It includes me on a stage in front of 1,000 people, dressed up like Fraeulein Maria singing Do Re Mi accapella solo and dancing around the stage with 15 little Chinese girls. It is what nightmares are made of.


I leave for the states on Saturday June 16th and I will miss China so much!! I love it here and could live here forever if I ever had the chance.

Great Mongolian Romance 2007

On our way home from our afternoon horseback ride, our guides wanted to stop off at the base of turtle rock and play some pool. There are a few pool tables set up and it is apparently their only form of entertainment. So we stopped and I met a Mongolian cowboy named Suuk Bot. He spoke no English but we had a lovely little chat, aided by Burma, who also served as our translator. We went back to our Ger and hung out at the billiards table in our little Ger town and a little later Suuk Bot showed up and wanted to hang out. It was a very funny conversation that we had through Burma, our translator. He asked me how old I was and not long after that he suggested that we get married. I thought maybe that was a little fast for me to jump into an engagement so I decided to point out some potential difficulties we might have as a couple, he gave some rather compelling arguments. I asked him how we were supposed to communicate if we couldn’t speak the same language. He told me that he would teach me Mongolian and that we really wouldn’t need to talk much. I can vouch for the fact that he really was a man of very few words, unfortunately I am most definitely NOT a woman of few words. I asked if he had ever been to the US or would want to live there he said we could go on our honeymoon there but then we would live in Mongolia. He told me he was the best looking Mongolian around and he was very rich and would be a very good husband. He invited my friends and I to his ger (which he shares with his parents) for breakfast the next morning. He said he would come over to our Ger on his horse to take us back. The next morning he knocked on our ger door and then led us over to his Ger past his herd of horses. His mother made us fried empanadas for breakfast and we hung out in their Ger. Suuk bot showed me all of their baby cows and after breakfast this dad took us to show us where they get their drinking water. They attach a plastic bottle to a tap in a tree and take the water from the tree. We had it for breakfast. It was cool and really good. Suuk Bot invited me to stay there at his Ger with him while the rest of my friends headed back to reality. I considered my options carefully, and while I do want to learn new languages and live abroad for the rest of my life, and as cool as it would sound to say I lived in a Ger with my Mongolian cowboy and drank water from a tree…I hate the cold, and Mongolia gets cold. So I said farewell to my Mongolian boyfriend and I am very happy that we ended things amicably.



We went back to Ulaanbaatar and went to a real Mongolian dance club. The live band was from the Philippines and all of their songs were in English. We had a great time dancing and then went home and crashed. The next day we bought some souvenirs and visited the square. Odd, fun fact: Most large cities in the world have a main square and it is typically my favorite place to visit. Then we got on the train to head back. The ride was much less crowded and therefore, much more pleasant…at first. I tried to sleep but the windows are not sealed very well so half of the Gobi desert flew into the train car and I inhaled it. My face and mouth were coated in a layer of dust and I couldn’t breathe so I sat up with my covered by my shirt all night.

We found a dirty little minivan with only one backseat to take us across the border. Unfortunately the border was closed so we ended up waiting for 8 hours for it to open. There were two alleged causes for the closure. One, we were told that the border couldn’t find the stamps for the passports and the second report said there was no electricity. We finally got through, and got on our bus back to Beijing. We slept on the bus and arrived in Beijing at 5 am. I went home, showered and then headed up to church. It was a fabulous trip. I got everything out of it that I wanted and would do it again all the same in a heartbeat.