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.

I’ve been following the plight of the MTA’s budget crisis, which will directly impact almost half of New York City’s 1.1 million public school children who rely on the free or discounted MetroCards that the MTA provides for them in order to take subways and buses to school.

You can see my coverage here.

I’ve been on Spring Break this week, essentially catching up on a semester’s worth of sleep and enjoying the sunshine, but the week before I attended a rally and hearing held at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It was the last of five public hearings the MTA held in each borough to discuss the proposed cuts in services and jobs to make up for the transportation authority’s $750 million budget gap.

Before the hearing, the transportation workers union held a large rally to show their displeasure with the upcoming cuts, which would cut jobs, shut down or reduce bus and subway lines, and end the free MetroCard program.

I spoke with Richard Jasmin, 52, a bus driver in Brooklyn (pictured above) at the rally. I asked him about the cuts to the student fares and what that meant for him. He said, for one, he’d be scared for his life because kids would “do anything to get to school.”

I don’t remember ever wanting to go to school so badly that I’d assault a bus driver. Let’s hope he was joking.

The giant inflatable rat, a union rally mainstay in NYC, was in attendance as well.

A small, but vocal group of high schoolers, mainly from Harlem, showed up to voice their displeasure over the loss of their MetroCards.

It was high security at the hearing. They even confiscated my reserve of almonds in my messenger bag.

The auditorium only held 600 people. It was filled to capacity and a steady line snaked out and down the hallway. Outside, the rally continued for the news cameras.

Inside, everyone got their two minutes to speak before the board, which included MTA chairman Jay Walder himself.

The final vote on the fate of the MTA cuts will occur on Wednesday, March 24.

I met him and Snow up in Harlem around 11:30 a.m. Thursday and we hopped in the car and zipped over to Queens.

At the vet, Snow and CJ waited patiently. She didn’t give off the impression of a dog who was two days away from death, but she did do a lot of whining and squirming while we waited for her turn in the examination room.

Much of the argument I am trying to present in my piece on pit bulls is that they are treated almost as a minority. People fear them and hate them without ever really trying to understand them as a breed. It was quite refreshing to see CJ conversing openly with the two other couples about their dogs in the waiting room. They all had much smaller dogs, but it was clear that everyone in the room was speaking the same language: the language of passionate, concerned pet owners.

Questions like “What is she in for?” and “What about your dog, what is he here for?” were thrown around.

They joked about spaying and neutering and their apprehensions, projecting their human fears of their own castration onto their beloved pets. The surgery Snow was facing was essentially a glorified spaying. Her uterus would have to be removed in order to take care of the infection.

After much waiting, Snow got up on the table. She wasn’t too keen on having her swollen and painful private parts probed and put up a bit of a fight by growling and thrashing. Her metal chain and long nails on the metal exam table sounded like hail on a tin roof as she struggled to get down and away from the vet’s probing hands.

The vet very quickly and methodically produced a leather muzzle from the drawer for her to wear as a precaution. CJ and another veterinary technician held her tight. Snow leaned into CJ’s embrace, as if hoping to bury herself in his thick black leather jacket to escape from the uncomfortable probing.

A quick x-ray showed her uterus was in bad shape, and her spine was a bit arthritic from giving birth to puppies.

The uterus is the dark mass near the right half of the x-ray.

CJ haggled a bit with the vet to get the bare minimum of services rendered to get Snow healthy again. Then, he told Snow he’d be back first thing in the morning on Saturday to pick her up.

CJ dropped me off at home. I ran out to the 110th Street station to snap a quick stock shot of the subway for my latest Covering Education blog post.

I’m covering transportation and safety issues for the course and the post was about a new report released by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy that projected MTA fare hikes to be at least 15 percent to make up for their $400 million budget gap. Last month, they voted to phase out free and discounted MetroCards for the city’s public school students. The report calculated that this hike would cost a working family of four with two school aged children an extra $2300 a year in transportation costs.

For a simple blog post, I spent entirely too much time on an accompanying infographic on the history of MTA fare hikes. I’m pretty proud of it though.

I only took the subway up to 116th St. Then, I walked back down to my apartment. Since I had my camera, I figured I’d finally take the picture I’d seen countless tourists take before on my daily walk to and from school. This is Tom’s Restaurant. Probably best known as “the Seinfeld Restaurant.” Although, the diner scenes were shot on a set, they used this shot of the actual Tom’s Restaurant in the show.

Look familiar?

The restaurant is also the inspiration for the song “Tom’s Diner,” which was released in 1981 by Suzanne Vega.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z66rDVkaK4w&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00]

My personal favorite, and probably a bit more familiar is the 1990 remix by British group DNA.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWMToInrke0&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00]

I caught a cool glimpse of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as I turned to cross the street to head back home.

I finished the day off glued to my computer, working on various projects. The computer work was only broken by a nice run in Central Park. I listened to the first episode of the new Freakonomics podcast. I’m a fan and it will fit nicely into my running repertoire.

I like busy days. I never seem to get through everything i’m supposed to, but I always go to bed feeling complete.

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.