School starts soon but before that...

So time here in NYC has been great. I was officially offered a job this past Wednesday. I will be working at Passages Academy in downtown Brooklyn. The school has multiple site and my site is at the boystown campus. http://www.boystown.org/new-york I'm still learning about the school and there is a whole lot more for me to learn before I really have a complete picture. the school is very small. They max out at about 46 students and there are 10 teachers on staff. The kids are at boys town for multiple reasons. Passages academy is a part of District 79 here in NYC. District 79 offers alternative education programs to students who have been incarcerated, teen mothers, and people aiming for GEDs. This district is a relatively new thing for Teach For America. They placed one person in District 79 last year and two of us are in District 79 schools this year. I couldn't be more thrilled about my placement. It will be a unique challenge.

When it comes to living in NYC there is always something new to see and something more to do. I have officially finished my first class for grad school and I got an A. (woohoo) A new student ID card and more student bills to pay. However, being a grad student at Hunter College is not a bad situation. My overall cost is significantly lower than what it was to be a Whitworth student. I don't think that I will be quite as proud of this diploma as I am of my Whitworth diploma. I certainly wont be paying as much for it.

Apartment hunting is not too fun. The cost to live in NYC is outrageous. I'm hoping to get housing figured out in the next day or two, but until then it is couch surfing. Today I was walking around downtown and found some fun stuff. Tim Horton's/Cold Stone Creamery, a Dunkin Doughnuts/Taco Bell, and life is never really complete until you see the naked cowboy...I mean cowgirl. She is especially unique because she is as old as my mother and looks about as fake as possible. This is NYC. If anyone wants to come join me here you are more than welcome. Short term visits are good too.

Catching up

So I realize that it has been a really long time since I have updated this blog which unfortunately is not something that I was hoping to do when I first started the blog, but life is full of unexpected things. The reality is I have been waiting to post something until I was placed in my school for the fall so that I could talk about that and be excited, but unfortunately that hasn't happened just yet. So the reality is I still haven't figured out where I will be working this coming fall. The whole process has been pretty frustrating because while TFA sets up interviews for me I don't really have a ton of control over where I go. My first few interviews went well, back in July, but the first two schools ended up deciding not to hire anyone for the positions. The third school chose a different TFA guy who just came out of the workplace so he actually has experience. Then I took my week off to go to Canada which was great, but put me behind in the placement process since most people still waiting were placed during that week. Oh well.

Then I came back and last week we had round zero training which was not bad, but I missed about half of it because I was out interviewing. Last week I interviewed at four different schools which equated to eight interviews including phone interviews, in person interviews, and demon lessons. Soooo much fun. The basic gist of things is that one didn't think I would fit well in the system they had where I would have had to be a resource room specialist. The second said that they would love to hire me after my demo lesson if they had a position for upper elementary school because they thought I would be far better with that than the first grade position they had available. Oh well. I guess it is a good thing they liked me seeing as how that was the top charter school in the state of New York. So right now I am waiting to hear back from the other two schools. I had my last interview with one of them today, the other I finished up with last week, but with TFA we don't want to take any chances so tomorrow I get to go on a whole new interview with a new school. Hooray for going to grad school tomorrow for an eight hour class then leaving it and going straight to the interview which of course is in an extremely inconvenient location almost two hours away via public transit. So right now my hope and prayer is that I will get an offer tomorrow so as to avoid that whole process. I should find out soon anyhow and I'm excited to see where I end up. At the moment the schools that are pending are in Washington Heights (upper west side of Manhattan) and the other is in Brooklyn with a school for students who are in detention and awaiting court dates. I'll be sure to update again soon once I know something.

Grad school is not exactly what I would call challenging so far, but we will see.