Imagine this…

Right now, it’s August 11, 2009 and I’m sitting in an empty apartment with two fans blasting at my face in below 80 degree weather. I’m going into my second week removed from the NYC Teaching Fellows summer training. I wait anxiously for a new start at the elementary school that hired me, a new roommate, and another Yankee game on the radio. I just graduated college and I’m about to embark on a teaching journey that will drain me more than any theatre production at Paramus Catholic High School, board meeting for the Fordham Observer or camp experience at Camp Timberledge or Star Lake Camp could ever do.

Most importantly though, with all of this going on, the New York Yankees are in first place with a five and a half game lead after a four-game sweep of the Boston Red Sox.

Why a blog now?

As my best friend Sarah would say, I have had an interesting history with blogs in the past. I started with LiveJournal before LiveJournal was “cool” back when I was 13 (2001). With my posts came drama, mostly started by me. After off-and-on attempted to blog, my personal posts hit both their highest quality and their lowest frequency when I started at Fordham University my freshman year. I loved to write, but I just couldn’t get enough on my posts to post frequently.

I changed direction and decided to write for MVN: The Bronx Block for a year that ended last season around the end of August. With a very recent change in the entire layout of the site, I just lost the desire to blog on my favorite team while learning a completely new system and writing about extremely specific things. However, a year can change a lot of things.

My time on the Fordham Observer really transformed my writing for the better, especially the last semester. I worked on a personal feature titled “All Kinds of Ripped“, which traced my progress in trying to lose 15 pounds by graduation. Though I only lost 5 pounds, the feature allowed me to write about anything I wanted in line with the feature. I had so much fun with it, though my time with the Observer shortly came to an end. With no public outlet for my writing, I was left with nothing to record the biggest translation my life has taken since being accepted to Fordham. Sure, I have some pictures (many I can never post due to prior shenanigans), but what about the hard, “I want to quit” days? What about the high, summer hikes up St. Nicholas Park to City College to take my summer courses? What about the small moments that may not seem a lot to most, but to a teacher, it means everything?

Without a constant presence of a camera, pictures can’t chronicle those moments, but writing can.

That brings me to the question: Why a blog now?

This blog is an outlet for many of my friends who are aspiring to be teachers. This blog is an outlet to let my friends and family know what is going on in my teaching venture. This blog is an outlet for me to talk about my favorite team, my favorite sport, my career, and my experiences within all those things and beyond. Lastly, this blog is a way for me to self-reflect on my experiences and learn from each of them as I write them out.

As I’ve been told, self-reflection is extremely important for teachers to do in order to adjust accordingly to his or her students. With this blog, I’m taking self-reflection onto the public scale mixed with reflections on my passion for baseball, my history with the Yankees, and my love for my future doctors, lawyers, professional athletes, engineers, dancers, singers, photographers, artists, cooks, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and yes, teachers.

Expect honesty posted once every two days with pictures, videos, and other oddities mixed in. I will also answer any questions about the Fellows program, about my thoughts on the Yankees, and everything in between. Lastly, I will also talk about whatever I wish, giving a friend or two a shout-out if warranted.

Think of this blog as a Jackson Pollock painting mixed with Andy Warhol’s eccentricity and Jasper Johns‘s awesomeness… wearing the interlocking NY on a midnight blue cap.

I’ll leave you with a poem that many of my Fellows friends have seen. Taylor Mali speaks about what teachers actually make.

Blessings.