one month in!

     Sorry everyone that it has been so long since I last updated!  I have been SOOO insanely busy!  I am now officially done with my first masters class!  It was a years worth of biology in 4 very short, but at the same time very long weeks.  So, 6 credits down, 24 to go!  We have also started our tSAF (teaching for student achievement framework) classes, which will continue through til August 5th.  In these, which are 2 hours every evening, we are learning teaching methods and all that good stuff.  It is very exciting and I love the instructor, who was a teaching fellow in 2003 and is now in his 8th year of teaching in the NYC public schools! The schools just found out their budgets and there is no hiring restriction for hiring middle school general science teachers, so that is very good news!  Hopefully I will have a job very soon! 
     I just moved into the apartment I'm going to be subletting for the summer, and it is in a neighborhood called Park Slope in Brooklyn.  I'm super excited about it, I have my own bedroom, which is furnished, and an awesome roommate!  By roommate, I mean apartment mate. I'm still trying to explore the city as much as possible in my time off, but it is difficult with so much time being devoted to class, studying, doing projects, and pretty soon making lesson plans!  The other week I went to the Museum of Natural History (the movie that the movie "Night at the Museum" is based on) and spent an hour and a half in the ocean life room.  I felt like the biggest nerd ever, reading literally every single plaque on every display, but it was so amazing!  They even have a giant blue whale hanging from the ceiling! So yeah, basically I loved it.

giant blue whale!

dinosaurs in the front lobby of the museum of natural history

 The other weekend my friend had free admission to the central park zoo!  It's a very very small zoo, and it isn't the main New York zoo, that is in the Bronx.  But it is very cute and their polar bear display was incredible!  And the polar bear was swimming laps!  They also have a super awesome penguin room, but it wasn't as good as the one in St Louis b/c the penguins were all behind glass, and in St Louis you feel like they are going to jump out of the water at you! 

polar bear swimming at the central park zoo

plaza in central park

a car overpass with a pedestrian underpass in central park

 I also encountered a very strange piece of "installation art" when I was walking the other day.  I was walking to my friend's apartment in manhattan from the subway stop and I noticed a store front with lots of people standing in front of it.  I stopped and looked in, and there were people crawling in slow motion up a ramp and then sliding down and rolling on the floor.  All in slow motion.  With a fan.  It was one of the weirdest things I've ever seen....I guess I just don't have an eye for "art"! 

"art"

nyc subway stop

      Starting on this coming tuesday, July 5th, I will be doing field training from 8-12 everyday.  This means that I will be teaching a summer school class!  I will have a cooperating teacher, so I will not be on my own, but it is still a big step in the right direction!  I'm very exciting about it but also nervous!  But hopefully everything will be all good!  One of the things I'm most nervous about is making lesson plans....I have NO idea how to do that!  The teaching fellows have given us tons of great resources for this though and hopefully I will be able to create some halfway decent ones!
     I hope everyone is having an awesome summer and surviving the heat in St Louis.  It's been around 85 each day here, so not too bad at all!  Miss you all!!!

week one

Well I've made it through week one!  It wasn't all that difficult since we didn't have school wednesday or thursday due to a jewish holiday.  The school that I'm attending for my masters classes is called Brooklyn College and it is in a very very jewish neighborhood.  Brooklyn has one of the largest populations of hasidic jews in the world, so jewish holidays are all observed.  Class is definitely intense, we are covering an entire year of college biology in 4 weeks.  We have class 6 hours a day right now, from 9-12 and then 1-4. I take my teacher certification exams tomorrow - kind of nerve racking!  I have two exams to take, one is the LAST, which is the liberal arts and science test.  The LAST tests your reading comprehension and common sense and is set up kind of like the ACT.  The other exam I will be taking is the Biology CST, or content specialty test.  The CST is 100 questions long and tests your knowledge of all things biology.  They can ask anything, so I'm kind of nervous about that one! But hopefully I will do well!  We also have our first exam in class on monday, so lots of studying for me this weekend! I hope everyone is doing well, text me so I can keep up with all you crazy cats!!

Coney Island!!

Hey everyone!  I hope you are all doing amazingly!  Yesterday my friend and I went to CONEY ISLAND!! Before going, my impression of Coney Island was that it was going to be an old run down amusement park.  I was so wrong!  Coney Island is actually pretty awesome! The original Nathan's hotdogs is in Coney Island, and it hosts the annual hot dog eating contest every year on the 4th of July.  The records were disgustingly high, 41 for women and 63 for men. or something like that. 

My friend had a giant chili dog and I had an enormous thing of cheese fries.  Remember this point, it is important later.  After chowing down, we walked around on the boardwalk and looked at all the cool little food shops and saw a ton of people dancing.  It must have been a Puerto Rican pride day, because there were Puerto Rican flags everywhere and people playing salsa music and having an amazing time!

random dance party in the middle of the boardwalk

(Side note - a giant cockroach just crawled through the crack in the door and I made my friend kill it with a shoe....anyways...)

After scoping out the boardwalk and checking out the cool ocean views, we walked around the amusement park.  It basically had rides you would find at a fair.  We rode 3 of them, all of which involved spinning around at very very high speeds.  Probably not a good idea after just eating chili dogs and cheese fries....so after we rode the rides and were very nauseous we decided to go sit out on a pier that stuck out into the ocean.  The weather was gorgeous, and it was awesome being oceanside! 

we rode this!

there were TONS of people out enjoying the amazing weather!

I know most of you probably don't know where Coney Island is, it is at the very very bottom of brooklyn.  BUT the subways go there, so it is very easy for anyone in new york city to get there!  I captured a screen shot with my phone to show where it is...we were where the blue dot is.

Tomorrow is my first day of class!  I'm excited to meet the other science immersion fellows at Brooklyn College!  I will update you all soon! 

Amazing day

Yesterday was my best day here so far...I went down to a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Flatbush for lunch at a vegetarian Caribbean place called "strictly vegetarian". The street that it was on was so incredible. I wish I had a video camera strapped to my head so that you all could have seen the street too! The neighborhood has a huge Caribbean population and there were women is beautiful colorful outfits, huge fruit and vegetable markets, fish markets, stores blaring reggae...it was such an awesome place! I saw a citi branch on that street too, haha!

The place I ate was very unique and could definitely be described as a 'hole in the wall'. There were 7 dishes, all of which were vegetarian, and for $9 I got a medium, which was basically a styrofoam to go box so full of food that I think I'm set for at least 3 days.  After I headed "home" to put my leftovers in the fridge I headed into manhattan to go to an apple store in hopes of getting my phone fixed...didn't really work out, but oh well, the store was cool looking! It was 3 stories in an old brick building with giant windows and the stairs inside were spiral and a strange bluish almost see-through color and very trippy to walk up. After that I walked along a bit of the Hudson river park, which is a 5 mile strip of grass with a bike path and walking path. I saw some really cool views of the new jersey skyline and I even saw the statue of liberty off in the far far distance. 

 I also could see the top of the empire state building when I turned around to walk back from the pier! Next I hopped on a few more trains and got off in Williamsburg, a part of Brooklyn and home to all of nyc's hipsters. Williamsburg is directly across the east river from manhattan and has amazing skyline views and a cool actual park full of sunbathers and families hanging out. I sat on a rock at the beach there and just enjoyed the weather and the views of the skyline and boats going by.

Later in the night we (me and the 4 guys whose couch I'm living on) went out to a place in Astoria (queens) for a going away party of a Wooster grad that lives in the city. It took 2 hours to get home because trains don't run very often late at night...but that's a price you pay for taking public transportation I guess! Today I'm headed to coney island with one of my best friends from elementary school that lives in new york. I'm trying to squeeze as much stuff in before my training starts and my life is over! I miss you all and hope citi is going well!! I checked the forecast for St Louis today and almost passed out...I'm so glad I'm here with a high of 77, not in St Louis with a high of 97. Vom.

NYC!!!

Phil and I are here! We've arrived in the city and are currently on one of the hottest buses in existence. We're headed to port authority where we can switch to the c train to get to my friends! I'm currently drenched in sweat on this bus...no Bueno. But we're here so no matter!

the beginning!

Today was definitely a very hectic day.  Phil and I are all moved out and are staying at my grandparent's house tonight.  I woke up at 4 in the morning to finish packing...whoops! Guess I should have started packing weeks ago when everyone told me to!  Oh well, it is all done and the apartment is empty.  One of the weirdest feelings right now is that I don't have any keys.  No apartment, no desk at work, no car.  It is definitely very strange, but a good strange b/c now I wont have to look for them every 5 seconds! I'm full of all kinds of emotions about tomorrow, today is definitely the last page in a chapter of my life and I have no idea what tomorrow is going to bring.  Our plane leaves St Louis at 7:30 and we have a layover in Chicago and then land in New York at around 1 pm eastern time.  I miss everyone at CitiMortgage and I had a very hard time telling my family goodbye.  I also just realized I've used the word definitely waaaay too many times in this post, I'll try to pick up a thesaurus before my next one.