My Journey - Part 9

Yoga was such a nice addition to my life! It was certainly nice to have it to look forward to or to reward myself outside of the drudgery of work.  My wife was in very good spirits too. At the time, she found something that related very well to her creative interests, and her interests in beauty and fashion. She was excitedly working her way through a professional cosmetology program at the New York Aveda Institute. However, with all these positive things going on in my life, the pressures work and of living a a big city for ten years were beginning to take their toll on my health. I still came home a nervous wreck at the end of the day.

Even with a decent school administrator who treated staff with respect and dignity, forces outside of the school made my future career prospects with the New York City Department of Education appear dismal. The Mayor threatened layoffs and changes to our contact, and the state imposed ongoing cuts to our school funding. Around this time, I found myself trolling around a popular Internet ESL forum and looked at the jobs posting. I coincidentally found a position for a high school ESL teacher in Kirishima near my wife's hometown of Kagoshima in Japan. Because my marriage is an international one, it seemed reasonable that Mizue and I would either continue living in New York City, or live in her hometown of Kagoshima.

I prepared my family for the possibility. I applied for the job and waited. And, waited. I waited a while longer and still hadn't hear a decision from Tim Board, the teacher in charge of hiring at the school. I then more or less forgot about the job except to periodically E-mail Tim that I was still interested in the position. After four months of waiting, Tim finally got in touch with  a job offer. He said that the director of 25 years had changed, and that this had caused considerable confusion and delays on his side. Tim and I spoke on the phone and exchanged several E-mails, while my wife and I talked over the offer. In the end, I found that my feelings had not changed about the Department of Education. I wanted to quit being a public school teacher in New York City. Mizue said she really wanted to go back to Japan, and that she could pursue her cosmetology career there. Thankfully, cosmetology, much like ESL teaching, is a career in which you can cross borders easily.

A week before our move, the tsunami, multiple earthquakes, and a nuclear disaster devastated many communities in Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima prefectures. It was a horrible tragedy and a downer for my wife and I, and  caused great anxiety for friends and family alike. I thought back to my first disastrous year in New York City in 2001 when 9/11 destroyed many people's lives, and I shuddered. As I prepared to move, I went by my school one last time to pick up a final paycheck. This turned out to be a horrible visit, and not the friendly goodbye I expected. I ended up storming out of the office because I felt that the three secretaries had ganged up on me to talk me out of moving out of Japan. One even had the nerve to make a snarky remark about making sure I packed potassium-iodide tablets! Other people in our lives endlessly warned us by directing us to Internet and television news updates. Everyone we met wanted to know if we were still moving, and what our plans were. As tiring as all this was, I ultimately appreciated people's concerns as they definitely meant well. In the end, we kept our plan because we learned that Kagoshima was more than 800 miles or 1000 Km from the affected areas. We decided to take a chance, and with our three cats and my very heavy folding bike, we moved from New York City to Krishima, Japan in spite of all the troubles.

My Journey - Part 8

After my dance teacher's training, I wrestled with the idea of changing my position from ESL teacher to Dance teacher in the Department of Education. What did this involve and was it feasible? Joan Arnhold assured me and all of my classmates in the dance teacher's training course that there were many jobs for dance teachers in schools in New York. I spoke to a few people at my school, and people warned me that there might not be many dance teacher jobs. The school's Union representative, for example, told me that his wife worked with the Department of Education a few years back as a licensed Special Education teacher and also had a Dance license. He told me that she tried to switch positions, and had a dance teaching position for a year or so and then her school cut the program due to lack of funding. I had heard of a number of cases where schools cut their arts programs when they faced a lack of funding, and the current climate at public schools was tighter and tighter funding. Switching to a dance teacher's position away from my steady ESL teacher's position sounded a little risky. I checked the Department of Education website to see for myself how many dance teacher's jobs were available. I was surprised to find nearly a dozen, but disappointed to find that all of them were available only at charter schools. ,

For those of you not familiar with charter schools, they are schools with public funding that are given the freedom to radically alter their curriculum, job positions, and money allocations throughout the school. They essential operate like private schools outside of the control of the teacher's union, and are known to make teachers work a much longer work day for about half the pay of regular public schools. Certain community leaders favored them over traditional public schools because they promised to deliver better standardized student test scores than public schools. Some indeed yielded higher standardized test scores, but all charter schools could pick and choose their students. In contrast, public schools had to be open to all students regardless of academic background. The effectiveness of charter schools has greatly divided politicians, educators, and the public alike. But, most educators see them as an indirect way for legislators to kill teachers' benefits and public pension schemes that the Union and public educators worked so hard for for so many years to secure. If there were no stable public school dance teaching jobs, I was sure as hell not going to work for half the pay and half the benefits at a charter school!

So, where could I go next with my dance teacher training? Something that stuck at the back of my mind in exploring becoming a dance teacher was that my project with Shahar had got me quite interested in trying yoga classes. Without real prospects of becoming a dance teacher, the only moving I was doing was my tai chi long form at home. I wanted a way to get back into my body again. A little looking around on the Internet made it very apparent that there were almost as many yoga studios in each neighborhood as there were places to buy groceries! I was astounded... New York was well-serviced with an abundance - or perhaps an overabundance of yoga studios. To add to my surprise, I soon discovered a yoga studio 2 blocks from my apartment in Astoria, NYC called Yoga Agora. I liked the studio well because information about the teachers was not advertised on the website, and with the incredibly cheap rate of $5 a lesson, the classes were practically free. With no egotistical teacher-gurus and barely a dent in my pocketbook to worry about, I started to attend classes at the studio regularly for a few months. My teachers, Anna and Nick, were kind and gentle, and appreciated whatever you could give on a particular day. The element of competition I found all too present in some of the dance classes I had taken around the city was absent. I felt very much at home with the dimly lit studio, the flicker of candles, the ambient music, and the sincere thanks the teachers said to us after every lesson. I was hooked!

My Journey - Part 7

About 2010 when a very warm-hearted administrator, Ann Bello, was hired and things were finally settling down at my school, I received an E-mail from the Arts Department of the City of New York. Because of my background in dance, I was invited to enroll in an alternate certification program through the Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) at the 92nd Street Y to become a certified dance teacher.

I thought this sounded like a wonderful opportunity to get moving again - literally! The class met once a week for 6 months, and was led by Joan Arnhold - a long time philanthropic dance advocate and educator, and two other savvy dance educators - Ana Nery Fragraso and Ann Biddle. The 20 odd participants included veteran and amateur dance teachers and dancers, and yoga teachers. Through an intensive series of workshops we learned to design and lead classes that would accommodate all levels and age-groups to explore movement creatively and reflectively, and choreograph their own dances. Here is a picture of my class in one our the workshops:

I am in the foreground on the right with glasses.

As a culminating activity, we were asked to pair up and create a dance unit. I paired up with Shahar Yanay, who was already working as a children's yoga teacher. I had never tried yoga before, so I tentatively picked up a couple of books on teaching yoga to children through animal shapes. The topic related surprisingly very well with creative dance exploration because children could explore moving as animals as they learned the yoga poses. Animals, of course, are very high interest material for children, and content-wise all children come to class knowing something about animals. In the end, my inspiration turned the project into a voluminous 60-odd page document of detailed lesson plans mostly authored by myself!

Four or five months later, my hard work paid off. I was delighted one morning to look in my mailbox and see my Professional Dance Teacher's Certificate from the State of New York:

My Journey - Part 6

At the end of 3 tumultuous years with dismal school leaders, I thought about other things I had not done in New York. I hadn't danced for a while, so I thought I might try something different. I looked around on the Internet and became interested in martial arts - but after reading a few magazine issues of Inside Kung Fu, I was a little wary of the idea of sparring, being hit, or thrown across the room. There certainly were some excellent places to study in every imaginable style. It was New York City after all! Then, I learned on the Internet that tai chi was considered a martial art with movement that resembled dance. Tai Chi, I soon discovered, was a super way to de-stress and do something good for my body. I studied with an experienced teacher Sifu H. Won Gim at the H. Won Tai Chi Institute, a small studio near Korea Town in Midtown Manhattan. The training took incredible patience as a I spent a year learning, reviewing, and refining my 20-25 minute long Yang Style Long Form with a group of like-minded office workers and businessmen. Some of the more advanced students performed beautiful sword forms, and all of us had to do push hands. Push hands was grunt work as you literally had to stand and do resistance training with a partner pushing your wrist against a partner's wrist. In this position, Sifu Gim could inexplicably sent anyone flying across the room just by flexing the muscles in his wrist!

Public Tai Chi demonstration at an Annual Korean Day Parade -
I am in the back on the right wearing glasses. 

Performing excerpts from the Classical Yang Family Style Tai Chi Chuan - Long Form

at the Fall 2011 Kagoshima Daiichi High School Cultural Festival in Kirishima, Japan.

I spoke to some teachers at work about my tai chi training, and some colleagues were quite interested in what they heard. A few weeks later, we started a staff-only early morning "yoga-lates" class at my school a few mornings a week before work. The class went very well for about a year, and we all had the opportunity to teach parts of the class including a little tai chi. Unfortunately, there was a terrible bedbugs scare across the entire Department of Education, and staff began to find bedbugs in our school. We all sadly decided that we had to end the class shortly after. The demands of work also began to draw me away from tai chi, and I was attending tai chi class less and less often. At work and outside of work, I was once again - stopping moving.

My Journey - Part 5

A choreography by Saba I performed in in a showcase presented

by PMT House of Dance in Spring 2006 in New York City.

Before I stopped going to Saba's classes and hanging out with him, I had a great time rehearsing and performing his piece Rebound in a showcase presented by PMT House of Dance in the Spring of 2006. The title of the piece reflected the fact that almost the entire cast including myself and Saba were rebounding off failed relationships! But, the final result was one I was truly proud of. My wife who I began dating at the time came to all three performances, and I also went to her performances. She was studying jazz and lounge style singing at the Singer's Forum, so we already had much in common.

Shortly after this performance, I needed to look at my money situation seriously and not delve into fruitless pyramid schemes. I was seriously in need of work - a real job. Despite becoming far too busy too dance, my life improved a lot in other ways. I married my wonderful wife Mizue, and I got a New York City Teaching Fellowship through the City of New York which paid for a master's in teaching English while I worked full-time as a public school teacher. So, began my nearly 5 year foray into the art of teaching ESL to teens who were unable to read because of moderate to severe cognitive and emotional disabilities at Public School 721M in Manhattan. They were wonderful kids and the work was often fascinating, but it was incredibly challenging preparing lessons for students who could not read and write without the assistance of picture symbols and endlessly having to redirect students who were ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder). To complicate matters even more, I had to deal with very difficult bosses.

Around 2006-2009, I worked for 2 principals who were at war with the Teacher's Union at our school. The first principal, Sheryl Watkins, took a "my way or the highway" approach to leadership threatening teachers right, left, and center with insubordination or the non-existent category of "border-line" insubordination. The next principal, Carolle Brady, was clearly autistic and strongly believed that bulletin boards and the teachers' arrangement of desks in their classrooms were the only indicators of "good" teaching practices. She soon began to harass teachers without provocation, and threatened their jobs! Thanks to the Union and the support of the teachers, these two administrators were eventually removed permanently from our school.

My Journey - Part 4

For 10 years, I avoided dance - afraid I would get too passionate about it, afraid of not having enough money to pay my bills, or afraid of not being good enough. Between 2005 and 2006, I had a personal crisis and I was between jobs. I decided that I needed to do something good for myself - and that something good was - dance. I had moved down to New York City - the dance capital - in the fatal year of 2001, but four years later I had still not even tried a single dance class. So, I purchased a few class cards at different studios around town, and soon got into a routine of taking daily dance classes at various schools including Broadway Dance Center, Peridance Capezio Center, The Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and PMT Dance Studio. I had seriously begun to train as a dancer again!

During this period, I discovered that beginner ballet classes as advertised at Broadway Dance Center were actually warm-up classes for professional dancers and dancers who were auditioning for professional roles. I had never danced with such an annoying bunch of pimadonas, and even had one classmate push me out of the way because I had difficulty mastering the steps of an accross the floor combination! Nevertheless, I enjoyed working most with Dariusz R. Hochman at Broadway Dance Center. Hochman was a task master who took all of his students seriously. He rewarded hard work with an old school tough love approach to ballet. He reminded me very much of my sarcastic, dry-humored but very dedicated ballet teacher at Simon Fraser University - Grant Strate. Hochman, in old school fashion, had separated the men and women into men's and women's groups when they performed ballet combinations. When the men performed, he slowed down the music so that we would have to jump higher. Mr. Hochman thought I was weak, and he used to yell at me to eat more vegetables. But with only three male students in the class, we got of lot of personal attention.

After trying a few more dance studios, I met a very interesting teacher who taught at Peridance Capezio Dance Center and PMT House of Dance. Sebastian Sabatier-Curiel, or Saba as he likes to be called, taught an enjoyable beginner Graham style modern dance class. He loved being the center of attention with constant joking, operatic singing in the middle of an exercise, or anecdotes about working with the late Martha Graham. After our classes, he often held small wine and cheese parties at his home, which oddly enough over time started turning into sales pitch meetings to recruit us into a pyramid scheme to sell health products for an Amway type of company called USANA. I eventually had to distance myself from Saba as a result.

My Journey - Part 3

       

Dance pieces I choreographed and performed in.

In the midst of my studies in Vancouver and Quebec City, I was actively involved in shows and working on grant proposals. I choreographed and performed in as many public shows as I could including student showcases, semi-professional productions, and dance festivals without ever quite becoming a professional dancer. By the time I had finished my year in Quebec, I had improved dramatically as a dance technician! But, I almost had a nervous breakdown over a referndum in quebec to separate from Canada, money worries, and the stress of writing for grants while studying long hours to improve my dance skill. After 6 years of hard work, I made a very difficult decision to become a teacher.

Dance pieces I choreographed on other dancers.