Neighborhood Beautification

Brooklyn, NY, USA

Yesterday, I was trying to fathom why there was a legion of Bobcats in my street digging up chunks of sidewalk.

From Beautification

This morning, when I looked out my window, not only were they at it again, but it became clear why. Between these trees going in, and the bike racks appearing all over the neighborhood in the last couple months, you can see the City hard at work here in East Williamsburg.

I'm a little conflicted about this. I know that trees and bikes are good for the environment, that providing these amenities may bring people, like hipsters, to the neighborhood who sign petitions about sustainability and outdoor spaces. All of those are good things. On the other hand, it's one more sign of gentrification in my neighborhood that the city is now paying for all these things, and while the fact that I live here is probably also evidence of gentrification, it wasn't so obvious when I first moved in.

From Beautification

When I first walked this neighborhood, I felt like the only non-Spanish-speaking resident in a neighborhood of young immigrant families with small children. Even at the Chinese owned and operated Chinese restaurant down the street, they speak better Spanish than English. It's part of the charm of New York City for me. And while progress is inevitable and in this case, at least, bears some desirable fruit, it leaves me surprisingly ambivalent.

Also, impressed. It's noon, and they've already completed one whole side of the street!

Snow!

Brooklyn, NY, USA

This is what I had the pleasure of seeing through my window today!

From Snow!

Of course, it's always more of a pleasure when I'm not the one clearing the sidewalk....

From Snow!

Aftermath

Some images I found of New York City, post-Superstorm Sandy:

Pre-Dawn Blackout at the ConEdison Plant:

Morning Slowly Dawns:

from my kitchen window:

From Superstorm Sandy

86th St N Line:

Battery Tunnel:

East Village:

Pile-Up:

Battery Park, apparently:

Sitting Out the Storm

Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York, USA

It's funny. Olga and I are usually content to sit at home in Bushwick for literally days at a time. Today, though, we woke up around noon, and by two in the afternoon we were going absolutely stir-crazy!

From Superstorm Sandy

From our windows, there doesn't seem to be anything going on in particular. Some wind, almost no rain, and eerily empty streets. Actually, not even that empty. The bodega across Wilson Street is open, and the Chinese restaurant, and the new coffee shop across Suydam Street, too. The coffee shop has only been open for a couple weeks, so they probably can't afford to close ... and they're still getting customers! As for the bodega and the Chinese restaurant, the families that own and run them also live on the second floor with an internal staircase to get home, so why wouldn't they stay open for as long as they have even a trickle of customers?

Meanwhile, I'm more than a little jealous of friends like Tiffany who are living close enough to the rivers to go for a short walk and see the storm sweeping in. I love storms, especially after all those years in the desert, but I love being safe and dry even more!

So we're sitting at home, watching it unfold on Facebook and TV (our electricity and Internet are just fine!), playing wild and vicious card games of Spit and Speed, and trying not to remember that we couldn't go anywhere even if we wanted to....

We Really Go To the Beach

Arverne on the Sea, NY, USA

From Rockaway Beach

This time we didn't take any chances on meeting in the city where we might be distracted. Instead, we met towards the far end of the L line, halfway to the beach.We meant to go to Rockaway Park Beach, but missed our stop and ended up in Arverne On the Sea instead.

Ultimately, that was probably fortunate. The beach was almost empty when we arrived, more birds and mussels than swimmers. A woman we met while jumping waves said the beach down at Rockaway Park is much more crowded, shoulder to shoulder. This beach, with ocean waves and laughing toddlers, was just perfect!

From Rockaway Beach

"You're so patient!"

Brooklyn, NY, USA

Today I was teaching some Yemeni and Sudanese women useful language for making an doctor's appointment. We had a dialogue that I had read with one of the students, and we were going through it sentence by sentence to practice pronunciation.

Some of my students didn't have the soft /th/ sound in their native dialects, so I showed them how moving their tongues from behind their teeth to between their teeth changed the /s/ sound to the /th/ sound. Then I had them practice blending words, like the way we don't say "Do you want to make an appointment?" but instead we shove it all together into "D'ya-wanna make 'n-appoin'ment?" I had them repeat it over and over, first together as a group, then one at a time, again and again.

"You have such patience!" said one student in Arabic.

After I'd taught her how to say the same sentence in English (and showed them how it was not quite the same as a "patient" at the doctor's), I said, "That's because I've learned several languages, so I'm sympathetic."

"You know exactly what it's like!" she agreed.

This is what I love about teaching. We laughed so much that two hours just flew by, and these women not only learned what to say and how to say it, but I could see them gain confidence from the beginning of the lesson to the end. One woman, who was only going to stay a little while until the citizenship class started, was still there at the end of the class, glowing with accomplishment.

A few months ago, when I was hating my job and wishing I could just give up working altogether and become a stay-at-home Mom, a friend said, "We just have to find you a job that doesn't feel like work." I found it. Unfortunately, it doesn't pay any money....

Crossing Brooklyn Bridge

Brooklyn and Manhattan, NY, USA

From Brooklyn Bridge

An old Peace Corps friend came to visit this week, and the timing couldn't have been better. In a happy/unhappy coincidence, I am newly unemployed this week, very glad to have a friend in town, and free all day every day to spend with her!

Today's agenda was a walking tour of downtown Manhattan, beginning with a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. My brother had done a similar walking tour when he was visiting in August, and it came highly recommended. And for good reason. The Brooklyn Bridge is a strikingly Old World piece of architecture in a very New World city.

Not to mention iconic. The Geiko Gecko has a great ad on the white line separating walkers from bikers. None other than Hugh Jackman jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge into another century in "Kate and Leopold."

Once in Manhattan, we wandered around in the historic seaport district, and along the wharf. I don't think of New York City as the home of tall ships, as I do Boston, but there they were! Not as old as Old Ironsides, I teased Arwen, but yeah, pretty old. Not long after, I had to leave her to wander the city alone, while I went back to Brooklyn for class.

From Brooklyn Bridge

I Know These Kids!

Burlington, VT

I’m sitting in my friend’s classroom in Vermont. Her German students have just gone home for the day, and she’s in a faculty meeting. While I wait for her, I’m contemplating the differences between her school and mine. This student population in rural Vermont is so much more familiar to me than the one I teach in Brooklyn. I immediately recognize these kids: the pretty girls, the jocks, the nerds, the freaks, the farm kids, the funny Asian or black kid using exaggerated humor to distract from his obvious minority status.

Today I was a guest in the AP Government class, and both the teacher and the kids had copious questions about the Middle East and the Arab Spring. They knew about current events, they’d been following Occupy Wall Street, they had a sense of world geography. Many of them have travelled abroad. They think critically as easily as they breathe. Several stayed after class to ask more questions, thank me for coming, and shake my hand on their way to lunch.

Of course, I don’t expect this of my students in Brooklyn, for many reasons. I know that the demands of poverty and gangs bleed away the time they might otherwise use to follow current events. I know that the homes here in Vermont mostly have two parents with college degrees, steady jobs, and the time and knowledge to help their kids with homework and get them excited about learning. And, of course, teaching an AP class and teaching Special Education are worlds apart. The reasons I had for going into the latter rather than the former still stand; I don’t want to teach “smart” kids full time. Their tendency for laziness is ten times more frustrating to me than helping students with disabilities overcome their obstacles.

At the same time, though, it’s a reminder that not all schools are like where I'm teaching now. There are schools without metal detectors, where students are trusted to go the library without a pass to work on a project, where students do class activities because they’re having fun and not because it’s graded, where seats don’t need to be assigned because the kids respect each other in the classroom. There are no security guards, and the kids aren’t afraid of their administrators. This is a school without bells, where kids wait for the teacher to dismiss them. An 80-minute period here flies by like nothing, when a 50 minute period where I teach can be torture to fill from bell to bell with work that students will take seriously.

The city of New York pays for my certification and Masters degree for a reason: because it's damned hard to teach where they're asking us to teach! It's also a population in desperate need of really good teachers. But someday, when I've put in my years here, I look forward to teaching in a small rural high school with kids I recognize from my own high school experience.

My Space

Brooklyn, NY, USA

From Brooklyn Abode

Last weekend, I went out and bought photo collage frames to fill with photos of friends and family, Thursday I finally bought the brads, and yesterday I got out the hammer and made space on my walls for my collages. So, I thought it was time to give you all a glimpse of my little Brooklyn home. And I do mean little!

This is our kitchen, and it's the only common space in our apartment! Not that I'm complaining. It's really quite perfect for Olga and I, and we hang out quite a bit in our little kitchen, but if we were ever to have company over, much less want to have a gathering of any sort, I'm not sure where we'd put people! In my office?

I was trying, with these bookshelves, to divide my bedroom into a sleeping space and a working space. In Egypt, I used my bed as a chair to sit at my desk, and that blurring of the lines between work and sleep was not always especially productive. This is somewhat of an improvement.

And that's pretty much the whole sha-bang!

Kids Say....

Brooklyn, NY, USA

Today, my student K says, "Miss Converse, can I come to your wedding?"
"Who says I'm getting married?" I reply.
"Well, of course you're getting married! We know you have a boyfriend!" she says, with that sassy slide of the head my students do so well.
"What would make you think that?" I asked, smiling inside because it's patently not true.
"Well, you always dress so nicely!" she says.
"That's called professional," I reply.
"No, that's not professional," she insists. "You dress that way cuz you're going on dates after school!"

So thank you, K. Now I know what's wrong with my personal life. I don't have a boyfriend because I dress too well. Perhaps if I dressed more like a slob, men would think I was actually single...?