A little update

Hello Again from New York City. Dad is really giving me run for my money now that he is blogging twice a month, although the blogs are fairly lame. Here is a view of the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset with the financial district behind it. I went to a park underneath it with my friend Adam. I had been across the bridge a gazillion times but never knew about the park. Three cheers for living in a city that you get to discover in layers.

A friend from the ward, who I actually knew from a ward in Provo performed at Amateur night at the Apollo. This is noteworthy for several reasons. First he is white! The Apollo is widely accepted as the heart of African American talent. It boasts making stars like Stevie Wonder, Micheal Jackson (although I don't know that they actually still claim him), Billie Holiday, Lauryn Hill, James Brown and our own Gladys Knight. Second he is Mormon and did a stand up comedy routine in front of a typically pretty rough crowd. He got booed off the stage within the first 3 minutes, much to the chagrin of the more than 50 people from our ward who came to cheer.



This era of my life at school is marked by many field trips. I feel a need to expose my students to interesting things and to give them the opportunity to be around adults who will support them. The problem with them is, they never want to go home. They are usually a lot of fun but VERY exhausting after working all day then traipsing all over the city with a group of pre-teens. Here are some of our field trips.

We went to the Little Red Lighthouse that is under the George Washington Bridge and ended up playing ultimate frisbee in the park next to it for like an hour. It was a blast. In this picture a few of the students were "posing" and Mr. Avedissian (my co-teacher) and I were making fun of the way they try to be all seductive at the age of 13.
This is a group of them that we took to Chinatown. I wouldn't let the waiter give them forks until they tried the chopsticks. They were pretty good sports about my China obsession and humored me by telling me that everything was cool. This was great for me becuase they typically try to convince me that I am not cool. Especially when they make fun of my cell phone. How do 13 year olds from the projects become such technology snobs?

I went with my friend Adam to the Chelsea piers to hit golf balls at the Hudson. None of mine actually made it but a few of his did.
This is a field trip up to Inwood Hill Park where the kids were able to climb around on rocks and talk to a ranger about all the animals finding girlfriends for spring.
I went to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart with my friend Aja and Jeff. I haven't laughed that hard in a LONG time. I thought I was going to die and I am pretty sure all the people around me kind of wished that I would.

The Easter Hangover

I got Good Friday off but our spring break is not until April. The NYC Department of Ed has chosen to solve the great Catholic Dilemma for us and they have chosen to honor the Eastern Orthodox Easter instead of the Roman Catholic.

My day off was filled with meetings, for girls camp and for school but I did get to stay up until 4am over at a friends house. I have not been able to stay up that late in FOREVER. By about 11:00 I was totally out of it.

Saturday night, some friends and I stayed up all night watching Pride and Prejudice. The only reason this is noteworthy is because the all-night Pride and Prejudice party was suggested and carried out by a guy and he is Straight. On top of that there was no hope of him or any of the other guys attending that night to hook up with any of the girls in the room. Throughout the night, straight guys always outnumbered girls in the room and we watched all 5 hours. Apparently these guys wanted some insight into the female heart. Just add this night to the long list of examples of how NYC guys are their own breed. At midnight I made myself sick on Easter candy as a way to commemorate another Lent over.


On Easter we had a group of friends over for an Easter ham. We have a very sensitive fire alarm and when there was smoke coming out of the oven it went off. The problem is that we have very high ceilings so there is little we can do to get it to stop. Two of our friends decided to help and get the smoke away from the alarm. Quick thinking.


On Friday, my field trip was canceled due to rain. The kids were LIVID with me for not being able to control the weather. I find their logic refreshing and mysterious. So in their anger they planned their own little sixth grader mutiny. It was a fabulous day!

I am taking my after-school group to Chinatown on Monday and I am very excited. Hopefully all will go well.

Spring comes MARCHing in...

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.

As promised...

So I am trying to become more responsible in 2008. I would say it is high time since I am now entrusted with the education of tender young minds.

First...a painful reminder that no matter how much I will it to happen the subway will never take me where I truly want to go.

Now, BERLIN!!!
So when I went backpacking through Europe a few years ago, I never made it up to Berlin and I really wanted to go. Teresa (my sister) wanted to go as well so we decided to set out complete with all four of her little boys, 6, 4, 3, and 4 months. That in and of itself is an adventure. I have traveled a fair amount and it was amazing the difference between traveling with adults and traveling with kids. They were not at all impressed with the historical significance of the Berlin wall!!! I had a lot of fun and I am so glad that Teresa and the boys allowed me to drag them all over Berlin. I love the city, it is a great mix of old and new and has such a charming feel to it despite its rather shady history.

The drive up took about 7 hours, with one stop at a McDonalds to play on the toys. We checked into an apartment that we rented for a couple of nights. I took the boys on a walk to get rid of some of their 7 hours of couped up energy scaring Teresa half to death, (I am not used to telling people where I am going or when I will be back, I answer to no one in my life) sorry Teresa.

My travel companions.
Batman
and the stroller boys.

The next day we went to see pieces of the Berlin wall and my favorite monument that I have ever seen. It is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews. The explanation on Wikipedia is surprisingly concise "It consists of a 19,000 square meter (4.7 acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38m (7.8') long, 0.95m (3' 1.5") wide and vary in height from 8 inches to 15 feet 9 inches. According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason."

The paths that lead through the concrete towers go up and down for no particular reason. It does give you an oddly chaotic feeling but then they are all perfectly arranged.

The boys thought of it as a maze and went running through all over the place. I would highly recommend this place.
I then ate a real live Berliner, right there in Berlin. It was fabulous, but I would submit that most German food is fabulous. I like it better than French or Spanish.
We went to see Checkpoint Charlie and had some dinner in a restaurant there. When Steven and I went to the bathroom there was a woman there and we were trying to figure out which bathroom was women's and which was men's, Steven asked in German and the lady responded in Spanish that she didn't know what he was saying. That language is so useful!! I use Spanish all the time.
Here is the famous sign that you would read as you passed through the wall to the soviet side.

Here is Nathan posing with a "guard" with Checkpoint Charlie in the background.
The next day we went and saw a piece of the wall that is still in place. History: At the end of WWII the allies (The US and the Soviet Union were allies) split up the occupation of Germany but they both wanted a piece of the capital city, Berlin, even though it was in the middle of the Soviet side. So they split it up but it was still one city and people worked on one side of the line and lived on the other, they shopped on the different sides and could pass easily no questions asked. The tension between the Soviets and the US increased and one night without warning the Soviets put up barbed wire, followed by a wall on the border, closing off the western half of the city to all the surrounding area, separating families, friends etc.

This is how it looked. The shabby white wall closest to the camera is the border wall with us on the Western side, behind it there is the death strip, sand and land mines and electric fences and barbed wire, followed by the inner eastern wall.
This is to show how tall it was.

We watched some videos in the museum and it was just so crazy and sad for the people, especially those in Eastern Berlin who were going to be occupied by a starving country. The US and the USSR used their position in Berlin to show each other that they were better and that the other did not have any power over them. I loved Berlin and all the history there.
Thank you Teresa and the boys for a great trip.

Winter

This Jacob growling like a lamb.

Hello there. So it has been over two months since I updated my blog and I feel that my only loyal reader (Mom) is getting hostile.

So as to keep things organized and accessible for my other loyal reader (Dad) I will write in a list.

1) I went to Utah for Thanksgiving and absolutely loved seeing the family. I was also able to hang out with a friend that I met in China, who convinced me to go skydiving in Ogden. For those of you who did not know, I am deathly afraid of heights and continue my life long quest to conquer that fear. So we drove up and they dressed me up like a road cone and then we got into this tiny plane with about 15 other divers who were all kind of nutty. When we got to 13,000 feet they all started jumping and the guy I was strapped to started pushing me toward the open door. I was SO scared but once I got to the door and the guy threw us both out of the plane it was a lot of fun. I had a blast and I can cross one more thing off of my list of 100 things I have to do before I die. Since I crossed that one off I have been looking into how to get to Antarctica and where the Dalai Lama is touring this year. New Years resolutions can be pricey.
2) I have seen many shows since I have been here in NYC but I had never seen Les Miserables. I went and saw it at the beginning of December and it was fabulous! It is definitely one of my favorite shows. I just find the story and the characters so compelling.
3) I went to Germany for Christmas and spent some great time with Teresa and her five guys. We had a wonderful Christmas Eve dinner of KFC and then a fun live nativity made more fun by Steven, Nathan and Jacob and their boundless energy. I was fortunate enough to play the part of the star again, only this time the star was merely perched on my finger instead of around my face.
As you can see in this picture the "wise men" were told to follow the star to baby Jesus. Jacob jumps right in and gets cozy with the baby, Stephen is merely enduring the play, and Nathan can't get his eyes off the star.
4) I got to play santa on Christmas Eve, and these are the fruits of my labors.

5) One of my students guessed that I am 50 years old. (WRONG!!!)
6) Another of my students used the F word as an adjective in his essay response to the standardized test they took today. The answer looked at little like this, “cuz he was F#@%ing pissed off” the correct answer (the one they will get from the students in the suburbs) is “He was upset”
7) After the test today my kids asked me what a calf was. They have no idea what most of the things in this test are talking about. A huge problem for them is vocabulary acquisition. I read through the test today and thought “could I have passed this as a sixth grader?” The answer, of course, but I had two educated parents who spoke in and educated English my whole life. I was surrounded by educated and articulate English speakers, everywhere that I went. From the time I was born I was constantly acquiring vocabulary. Only about 3% of the whole school population has parents who speak English and far less than that have parents with more than 7 years of formal education. In short, I am voting for Obama.
8) My roommate Cristi got the five hour version of Pride and Prejudice from Amazon and I have determined that there is no better escape from the drudgery of inner-city middle school stress than a nightly visit to Jane Austen's little dream word where people are polite even when they are cross.
9) I bought a space heater and my Mom got me an electric blanket and some very warm pajamas. These have revolutionized my life and have made me a bit of a recluse.
10) I will write about my visit to Berlin within the week. Just FYI I find the place charming and would love to live there, I think I have a strange pull towards all things, people and places with traces of communism.

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.