I took a trip out to Brownsville today to shoot some video for my Covering Education class. I shot this on the drive back.

I’m so close to graduating. I can taste it.

Slept in. Went for a run.

Met up with Fred. Biked to Central Park. They had a rail jam going on.

Fred indulged in some swag.

This woman was grooving to the tunes supplied by the Red Bull mobile sound system.

She had moves.

Next, we cruised to 125th St. in Harlem. First, I had to stop off at the heated bathrooms of the Lake House. Fred held my bike.

Went to Dr. Jay’s. Fred scored some cheap threads. An old, probably homeless, man pooped his pants in the store and got chased out. The ensuing chaos made for quite a scene. Back outside I snapped a shot of the Apollo before we left.

I wolfed down a torta at Taqueria y Fonda with Fred. We parted ways and I cruised to the Animal Care and Control shelter on 110th between 1st and 2nd Ave. I met up with Evelyne Cumps, a volunteer who runs the Compassion program at the shelter. She and the other volunteers walk the dogs in the shelter, many of whose fates aren’t very promising.

This is Baby. Baby was listed as “questionable.” Evelyn said she liked the dogs who need work. She walked her around the corridors of the shelter, stopping to give her pieces of meatloaf she bakes herself at home for the dogs.

This was the second visit to the shelter for my pit bulls story. The first visit, I only saw the dogs up for adoption. There were 18 of them that day. Only two didn’t have any pit bull in them. Person after person came in looking for a small dog to adopt. Nobody wanted a pit. Tonight, I got to go back into the shelter where the dogs are held that haven’t been put on the adoption list yet. More of the same. If I had to guess, it was 95 percent pit bulls and pit bull mixes.

After that, I headed to Brooklyn Bowl where Hot Chip played a DJ set. I don’t have any pictures. There were a lot of hipsters there.

I hadn’t been to Coney Island, so I was excited for the opportunity to see that part of the city. It’s a place that is both eerie and wholly intriguing. Now that it’s winter and the attractions are closed, it has a real post-apocalyptic ghost town feel. Vibrant colors and wide open natural light made it great for filming.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=3182386&dest=-1]

I chose to bike there, because I figured everyone else in my class would take the subway. It was a 30-mile ride to get there that took me down the west side bike path, across Canal Street, over the Manhattan Bridge, down Flatbush Ave to Prospect Park then all the way down Mcdonald Ave. until I made it to the Boardwalk. (Geography nerds, see map below).

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=40.673348,-73.744354&spn=0.49578,0.836334&msid=117499681667323575030.00047e96487c8774b42ee&output=embed&w=500&h=412]

Needless to say, I worked up quite a sweat. As soon as I stopped moving and started filming, the magnificent winter sea breeze froze my damp clothing immediately. Looking through my footage back in the lab, I noticed the camera seemed to do a lot of shaking towards the end due to my incessant shivering.

Pleased with the shooting I had done, I hopped back on my bike. Not 10 minutes into the return trip, I heard the familiar, terrifying noise of a flat tire.

“POP. SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” it screamed at me.

I came to a halt, luckily right below the elevated Avenue U Station of the F train. I hauled my bike up to the platform. The turnstile was one of those full-length cages so I had to shove my bike in, swipe my card, then push it through.

Then, I had to swipe myself through.

“INSUFFICIENT FARE,” the angry green letters beamed back at me.

Here I was in the middle of Gravesend, Brooklyn with my precious bike on the other end of the turnstile.

I walked down to street level and hurried to the other end of the platform, refilled my Metrocard and went to rescue my bike. All the while, I stopped to shoot some hurried video.

Luckily, my bike was still there. Although it had been moved aside to let passengers through.

Now, if you ask me to name the two most awkward things to do on the New York City Subway system, I would list them in this order: 1) film strangers. 2) lug a bike onto the train.

I had to do both.

It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience, but I’m alive and I’m glad to have done it.

I’m a journalist, I like having a good story to tell.

I walk through the door of Aspirations High School and into the open lobby. The fluorescent lighting bounces off the clean white linoleum floors and freshly painted white walls with blue trim.

It feels like a hospital.

“Um, excuse me, sir?” A voice barks at me from my periphery. It’s ripe with sass.

I haven’t set foot in the school for thirty seconds, and I’ve already blown the security checkpoint.

Oops.

The nice uniformed security guard takes my ID, lazily fills out a log book and makes me sign my name. I ask her for directions and she vaguely points me to the end of the hall. She snaps her gum loudly at me as if to signify I am someone else’s responsbility now. I turn right down the hall. To the left, in the other half of the building, is another high school, the EBC School. This is a new concept to me. I have always gone to schools that had their own building. Thus, a school is a physical entity defined by its building. Now, I am in one building that houses two schools.

Two minutes in and my mind is already blown.

The secretaries send me further down the hall. I wander down the sterile, well-lit hallway past a hall monitor, perched at the intersection of two paths. From his perch, he can see the end of the hall where the students enter from the outside which is stationed by yet another monitor. These men are not uniformed and are clearly staff members at the school who have a healthy rapport with the students.

I find the classroom I am looking for. Jeff Kaufman, the US history teacher, is a classic New York tough guy with a heart of gold. This former NYPD officer has bushy mustache, a local accent and constantly ends his statements about the state of education with a defeated, “but, hey, what are you gonna do?”

I come right into his classroom and we strike up a conversation. The desks are grouped in pods with tiny computer modules bolted into the center of each. Most of the classrooms are outfitted with these PCs. There is no computer lab here, every class is hooked to the Web. A boy and a girl are at one pod, cutting out templates from a piece of paper. Another boy sits slumped over at a chair with his walker in front of him. He is staring blankly at the front of the class with his headphones turned up.

I assume this is some sort of study hall or free period. I start asking Mr. Kaufman questions about the school. He tells me he has been teaching for 12 years and that makes him one of the oldest people at Aspirations. The staff here is young and progressive. This makes for a fun atmosphere, but things can be a little disorganized.

“It’s a teacher’s dream school,” he says.

He tells me there are 271 students. Not a single one is white. It takes a toll on the kids, makes them feel like a lower class. It doesn’t help that the school is a “transfer” school, which means the population is made up of kids who are overage but still need credits to graduate. Others were kicked out of their old school or had to leave for gang reasons. There is a nursery in the lobby.

Another boy stumbles in. He’s got a Dunkin’ Donuts bag in his hand. His iPod is blasting loud in his ear.

“This is Jamel,” Kaufman says to the boy and me. “Smart kid. I tell ya, if he cared half as much about school as he did music, he could really be something.”

Jamel slumps in his desk then gets out his breakfast and starts eating. Mr. Kaufman pulls out a piece of paper and tells him to get working on his essay.

Then, it dawns on me. This is second period. This is an actual class. Today, four kids showed up for Kaufman’s second period class. His roster shows thirty.

When the bell rings ten minutes later, none of them will have put pencil to paper and even started their essays.

Third period. We move one classroom over. Kaufman is a “traveling teacher.” His next class is a little larger. It starts with six kids and by the time the period is halfway over, the ranks will have swollen to double.

It’s Regents prep week, Kaufman says, which means he has to focus on getting these kids to pass the test which is required for them to receive their diplomas.

He doesn’t hide the fact that expectations are low. He states it plainly at the beginning as he goes over the practice prompt.

“It doesn’t matter what your score is,” he says. “You just have to pass. They don’t care what the number is, as long as its above a certain amount.”

His attitude is probably realistic, but it hurts to watch how plainly both the teachers and students handle the fact that these kids aren’t outstanding. There is no hope that they will be someday.

Just get them to pass.

I am not one to judge the effectiveness of the service, but I will say it is the most novel approach to eliminating bedbugs that I’ve seen during the course of the project.

He was pretty cute, too. Check back soon for a link to our full multimedia project, which includes some up close and personal video of bedbugs in an infested apartment and Cosmo hard at work in our audio slideshow. For now, I’ve embedded it for your viewing pleasure.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/8043870]

My buddy Fred is doing his Master’s project on amateur boxing enthusiasts. Apparently, boxing is the new yoga and yuppies can be seen mixing with people from all walks of life in the sweaty old gyms across the city.

I tagged along with him on a reporting run to Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, which happens to be New York City’s oldest boxing gym. It was amateur night and I borrowed my roommate, Cody’s bounce flash to take it for a spin. It was tricky, but I had fun.

We stayed for a couple of hours and took in four or five matches. It was really intimate. I got to watch as the blood poured down some poor kid’s face after he got rocked for three rounds. The contenders were pretty mixed. It was half women’s fights and half men. Each match was three rounds. No knockouts. A couple knockdowns, though.

It was also my first time to Brooklyn. I know with my background as the pulsemaster of Burlington’s coolness, it would be quite shocking to find out I have lived in NYC for over three months and haven’t made the pilgrimage to the borough that is the epicenter of all things white and hip. It was cool. I’m still a Bronx kid at heart.

Still have to check Staten Island off the list.