New York: Day 64

I've been able to update a few people as to how things are going for me down here in The Big Apple, but Eric tells me there's a lot of people asking him "How's your brother like it?" or "What's his school like?" or "Has he been devoured by subway rats yet?"

If you remember, or saw on my blog, the last time I put up a post was 63 days ago. That's a little over two months. You could then infer that I'm either a lazy douche-balloon, or I've just been that busy that I haven't had the time to sit down and get in some time as a word-smith.

I now understand the phrase "in a New York minute."

I've done and been through so much in the last few weeks I don't think I could put everything down here but I'll try to focus on the big stuff.

As I've told a few people, living in New York has been the easy part so far. Sure there are a lot of weirdos and people that dance on the subway trying to get a few bucks and I frequently play the game Crazy? Or using Bluetooth?, but overall NYC has been pretty good to me. Most people just want to be left alone and I've yet to be hassled. Unless you count train delays, because then I get hassled all the time (along with the rest of the city).

Queens in particular has been pretty great as it's slightly slower-paced than Manhattan and my apartment super quiet at night. However since my air mattress decided it would be fun to slowly start deflating over night, I've been sleeping on the couch for the last two weeks which has not been the best. Yea yea, I know. BUY A MATTRESS. I will! But my roommate agreement is only good until the end of May and the less stuff I have to lug around if I have to move, the better.

             New York has a surprising shortage of tree stumps.

Work is by far the largest stressor in my life. Even after 6 years of kicking ass and taking names at Hess there are still moments where I feel adrift at sea with no oar and having just lost my volleyball-best-friend.

It's tough. And I don't mean that in a Dangerous Minds kind of way, most of the kids at school are great but this is a super difficult time to get into the game as the school year is more than half over at this point and we're right in the middle of preparation for the state exams. 

My typical days starts at 4:30 when my alarm goes off and I slide out of bed and into the shower. By 5:30 I'm dressed (shirt and tie required) and out the door for the bus. I'm usually in Harlem just past 6am and in the school building at 6:30. Class starts at 8 and I'm usually home at 7pm. 12-13 hour days are normal, and with prep for the following day (and grad school on the near horizon) I'm lucky to get 5-6 hours of sleep a night. 

One of the biggest differences and things I've really struggled with is being a total hard-ass with the kids at school. My students in Taiwan knew that I could bring the hammer down if I needed to, but this is a totally different kind of class management beast. The standards at this school are super, super high and basically I get my salary to see that the kids are held to them. There is no speaking in the hallways, not following directions the first time usually brings either a silent lunch or a detention, and I'm making parent phone calls daily for a variety of reasons. Oh, there's theres frequently staff meetings at 7am and/or at 5:30pm to plan for the day/week or to debrief. 

By Friday I'm pretty beat down, but at least there's weekends in the City. I'll give it to these New Yorkers, they know how to do a proper brunch...

Stay tuned for another update coming soon!

Seven Days...

While I haven't gotten any creepy phone calls about one week deadlines, I'm officially 7 days out from the beginning of my next adventure: living in The Big Apple. Hopefully that unpleasant little girl from The Ring won't show up next week and crawl out of my television to do horribly terrible things like frighten me to death or leave the bathroom light on all the time.

I had been spending the odd hour here and there over the last month doing research on housing in NYC and everything that goes along with it, and there was a lot to learn. Then, two weeks ago, I confirmed my branch placement at Harlem West with Success Academy and that allowed me to finally get started on my housing search in earnest.

And boy was that fun.

I spent entire days in front of the computer drafting emails (nearly 30 by my count) and crawling all over the internet hunting for a place to live. I got mostly nothing in return, but  over the course of a week I eventually managed to lock in 4 possibilities: 2 in Manhattan and 2 in Queens. I thought that was a pretty good ratio because the usual vacancy rate in the city is a whopping 1%. Thankfully, I only had to talk to one mildly crazy renter who told me all about her terrible past roommates, her amazing cat, and her colonic regimen, which struck her place off the list.

So, last week I went back to the City and hoofed it all around town checking out apartments (note: things are much farther from each other than they appear on Google Maps). The first place I saw was in Hamilton Heights and though it was nice 3 roommates was a few too many for me. I had 4 (yes 4!) when I was a freshman at UNH. Never again.

I saw my top choice next and it was a beautiful place in Central Park North/West Harlem with two roommates and a five minute walk to work. But, they must have decided my awesome was too much for them and the next day they pulled in someone else. However that was okay by me because it was at the very top of my price range ($1150 a month for a room) and after I saw that place I trekked out to Astoria in Queens, which reminded me of arriving in Taichung all those years ago: it felt like home.

And next week it will be: 36th Street, right near Astoria Boulevard. One roommate, good price, and a furnished room.

Exciting!

Bonus points of you get this reference.

Now I just need to take the first week of February to settle in and test out my commute, because the real fun starts on February 9th when I begin training for Success. I expect to be working somewhere in the range of 55-60 hours a week, plus course work for my master's, and my levels of trepidation continue to rise. But, we'll see how all that goes when it happens. As a character from one of my favorite books once said, "We'll eat that horse when we get to it."

Of course I also plan to do a lot of exploring in the area around my new place. I've already done quite a bit of research on the Internet and there are so many restaurants/cafes/pubs and the like that I can't wait to check out. There's also a beer place to the north called Singlecut and they specialize in hoppy beers. Swoon.

At the end here I'll add that if anyone is about to get into the joyous slog that comprises apartment hunting in New York, I found Padmapper to be an excellent resource. It mostly pulls ads from Craigslist, but what I love about it is that you can overlay public transportation and neighborhood names, hide markers for apartments you aren't interested in, and save the location of the ones you've contacted. A lot of the time on Craigslist I'd find promising leads in areas that interested me only to find out that I'd emailed them already. I actually locked in my by using the Listings Project, which you can read more about here.

Anyway, cheers for stopping by. I need to run to the store because apparently we're in for "a crippling, possibly historic" winter storm. Hooray!

Back to the Big Apple

I'm two weeks into my new American adventure and so far I'd say I'm well over the jet lag hump but still slogging through my reverse culture shock. I borrowed my dad's car and drove up to NH the other day to see Mumma Weiss and that was really weird. I didn't get my driver's license until I was 24 and ready to leave for Taiwan so I'm not what you'd call an experienced driver, however getting a few thousand hours in on my Hartford has made my hyper aware and paranoid on the road. I'd almost forgotten that people here follow the rules.

But, the real idea behind this post is that I  went to New York City for a job interview on Tuesday. It was for a position at a charter school called Success Academy, the main office of which was in the financial district about a five minute walk from Wall Street and the NY stock exchange. 

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There were five other interviewees that showed up and I think I was the oldest by at least five or six years; most of them were talking about majors, school, and graduation and such. I remember what that was like, except in my day we graduated in the snow. Uphill. Anyway, we had all applied to be a Teaching Fellow for the winter or summer cohort. This consists of working as an assistant teacher and gradually taking on more responsibility to becoming a lead teacher while also doing coursework through Touro College towards a master's degree and New York certification.

At first we got the spiel about the school's history and mission and whatnot, which was nothing that we probably didn't know already from our pre-interview research. A few videos of current teachers followed to show different subjects and teaching styles and we had to analyze and discuss them. Then we got handed a nine line poem called Keepsake, which I knew about from looking up Success on Glassdoor and despite all of my best efforts before the interview I simply couldn't find it online. Julia (Julie? Julez? If you read this I'm sorry I forgot your name!), one of the four recruitment coordinators in the room took us through the poem as a Success instructor would, using "inquiry based instruction". She asked us a lot of questions, basically, and had our brains do all the heavy lifting. It was great to watch her work us through it and I couldn't help but think: I've seen some great teachers in Taiwan, but this...this here is the real McCoy.

Then the real fun began.

We had 10 minutes to plan for a 3 minute teach back (demo) on the poem, focusing primarily on  investigating and conveying the literal plot of the story and finishing right where we would start to delve into the deeper meaning behind the words. I remember thinking before the interview: Pssh, a 3 minute demo? Hah. That'll be a piece of cake.

Nope.

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I haven't felt genuinely nervous when teaching in a very long time and it was, on some level, refreshing. I did like the way that the teach back was structured in that each person would do their teach back and immediately reflect on what went well and what sucked before receiving feedback. Then each consecutive person would have to incorporate each previous person's feedback from the recruiters into their demo. That is, the sixth person had 5 other people worth of notes to work into their demo, on the fly.

I volunteered to go first.

We did well overall, and I was happy to be the guinea pig by going first. But, we then had to take some of the feedback we heard for someone else or that we got directly and state that was what we were going to work on and then prep for 5 minutes before doing a 1 minute teach back. Whew. 

Two writing prompts and a fifteen-minute one-on-one interview about my teaching and managing background were next and then, finally, I was done. 

This whole process had taken about three hours total and I hadn't had lunch, so I decided to swing by Katz's Delicatessen before I headed into Chinatown to wait for my return bus to Boston. Katz's is the place where Meg Ryan famously faked an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. Let me tell you, the pastrami on Rye at Katz's is so fucking good I'm not so sure that Meg was kidding around.

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                           Fully three incredible inches of pastrami (that's what she said?).

Traffic over the Manhattan bridge on Wednesday night was pretty much a glorified parking lot and it took nearly five hours to get back to Boston. At least the interview went well and my hotel's proximity to Chinatown helped me score some beef on rice for lunch on Tuesday.

I think tonight I'll finish up this post and then spend some time reading up on other jobs in NYC and Boston and maybe watch a movie. Tomorrow I'm off to Albany see a chum from high school I haven't seen in ages and has graciously volunteered to take me on a brewery tour of the capital.

See you later, chumps.