Three weeks in...

Well I have only been teaching for two weeks, but the training has been going for three and I am about to hit my one month mark here in NYC. To say that this has been a difficult experience would be an understatement. I didn't realize how important sleep was to my life up till now. I suppose that is because when ever I had a lack of sleep before in my life I had time to make it up. Well that is not the case here. You take what you can get, a short nap on the bus on the way to school or you give up on lesson planning at midnight knowing that you have to be up at 5am and even if you have the best lesson in the world you wont be able to present it if you haven't slept.

This past weekend I met up with Mollie McComb a friend from Whitworth and we went out to Staten Island and went hiking through a park. It is really great to get the chance to get away from TFA folks and see something different. It is also nice to have a friend who came from the same pond into this crazy NYC ocean. We also went to Redeemer Presbyterian Church this past Sunday. It is a pretty neat congregation and I hope that where I end up living will be within a functional distance of the church. After the service we strolled through Central Park. I wish I could afford to live near the park because it is absolutely amazing. Musicians, artists, trees, and grass although you can't walk on the grass because it is all fenced off. At least it is green.

My kids are priceless. Kids really do say the darnedest things. Today in class they had to use vocab words to create sentences. One of the sentences I looked at was 'the princesses and princes were bravely dancing.' Another said, 'Mr. Hamilton is magnificent.' I'm still getting used to being called Mr. Hamilton. What a strange thing. I do have one student who seems to have missed out on how to spell my name and when ever she writes it at the top of her papers she write 'Mr. Hamlet.' At the end of class today as a reward for good behavior we play Michael Jackson's Thriller and one of the students busted out a choreographed dance to it. He is the sweetest little guy. Being thin as a stick, wearing glasses, and soft spoken make him the person who I was least likely to imagine doing a dance, but he knew how to groove. The kids are great and life is going well here in the big city.

In the past week I have interviewed for two middle school special education positions in the Bronx. I don't know when I will hear back from them, but hopefully soon. I would love to be able to start looking for an apartment. Thats all I can think of for now. To my friends and family in Washington keep holding down the fort and for those of you elsewhere enjoy the experiences that life throws at you.