I will strike a deal with you Mom and Dad. I will update my blog every time you do. You are not allowed to harass until yours is more recent than mine. So here is some of what I have been up to. Warning: my life is pretty busy with a lot of the same stuff so if I run out of events to talk about then I will start sharing my opinions and we all know that my opinions tend to make Dad's face turn red and that vein in his forehead to pop out and then his speech becomes unintelligible other than an occasional "stupid liberal." You have been warned.
Here is a new picture to look at. This is mom at a restaurant that she really liked called Chocolate by the Bald Guy. They have good food and great Chocolatey desserts and the whole place smells like chocolate.
My life is very busy and very much the same. I am still teaching at MS 326 and struggling with/ liking it. We were just reviewed by the state a couple of weeks ago because we are on the state list and the city list of schools that are in danger of being closed down. It was pretty intense.
This is one of the classrooms I work in. Many people use it as a closet.
There were 20 state reviewers wandering around and going in to all the classrooms, talking to some of the students, and interviewing the teachers. They decided not to close us down this year but to keep a close eye on us and require the implementation of all sorts of programs, none of which are going to change the fact that our school is made up of 98% first generation immigrants, who don’t speak English well and can’t understand the standardized tests. I started an after school program for the well behaved kids who really want to learn and progress. My co-teacher, Mr. Avedissian and I teach them about the cool places in New York and then we take them there on a field trip. Most of these kids have not left the 5 block radius around their house since they arrived here from the Dominican Republic. They don’t know about Times Square, Midtown, the Upper West Side, Central Park, the Statue of Liberty. They think of New York City and America as a very dirty grid of old apartment complexes with rats everywhere. It is fun to watch their eyes open up to this great city. On Saturday we took them to the house that George Washington lived in during the Revolutionary war right before the British took Manhattan and (attempted to) fly kites in the backyard.
I am still taking classes for my Masters degree at night. It is exhausting, but I like my professors a lot this semester. I am taking a linguistics class that I find fascinating. Both classes are a lot of work as I guess they should be at the graduate level, but it is exhausting nonetheless.
I was just called as the assistant stake camp director, which if you read my blog entry about girls camp last year, you will know that girls camp for the Manhattan girls is an adventure all its own. I am excited but can’t get really busy with it until this school year is over.
I still work as the assistant shift coordinator and the Spanish trainer at the temple and I absolutely love my Saturday mornings there. I always said that I wanted to live in a place where the church was still growing and needed more willing hands. I always thought I would find that place in some foreign third world country, but New York has church service opportunities by the truckload and we are constantly recruiting. I have a ward calling, a stake calling and a temple calling and they are always needing more. I love that I can be of service.
My attempts to maintain a semi-normal social life are often thwarted but in the past few months, we threw a party in our tiny New York apartment, to which 100 people came…
On Chinese New Year’s Eve, which was also conveniently Ash Wednesday, a couple of my friends and I went down to Chinatown and had some real Chinese food. Then I took the next day off of school for….cultural reasons. Then another friend of mine had a Chinese New Year Party. It was a lot of fun. Hooray for China!!!
This is the wall of my friends house. They painted it with chalkboard paint and they change the scene depending on what is going on in their lives. This is their Chinese new year scene.
We celebrated Pi Day (3.14 or March 14) over at a friend’s house with pizza pie and real pie (of which I could not partake because lent doesn’t end until Easter).
I still live in Harlem, which means I occasionally get heckled, I occasionally see people get their luggage stolen as they get off the airport bus and attempt to enter the subway and I occasionally hear amazing gospel choirs as I walk down the street. All in all it is a pretty good trade off.
