ELA Blog Post for 29 October, 2017
These last few weeks, my ELA class worked on our Harvey Oral History Project. This project consisted on conducting various interviews to Houston residents about their experiences during Harvey, and then bringing those interviews and their messages together to create a multimedia presentation that gave meaning to our work. I faced a couple big challenges during this project and learned a lot from it.
The first thing I had trouble with during this project was the interview itself. I came into it with just under 30 questions to ask my interviewee and a target time for the interview of one hour. As nervous as I was about the prospect of talking for an hour with someone I didn't know, I figured that just over two minutes per question was a pretty reasonable thing to expect, and especially considering that a lot of answers would be of above average length, I was convinced it would be a pretty straightforward affair and I had very little to worry about. I was very wrong. Fifteen minutes in, I'd exhausted the majority of my questions. Plus, I had no idea how to ad-lib, wasn't at all prepared to adjust the direction or mood of my interview to fit unexpected answers from my interviewee, and was very visibly losing my cool. In the end, thanks to my interviewee's experience with interviews and some intervention from Connor, my group's notetaker, I managed to come out with an interview about forty minutes long. Now, the questions that always follows these sorts of stories are something along the line of "What did you learn from this experience?" or "What would you do differently if you had a second chance?" To be honest, I don't know. I know now another place where my social skills need some work, and I have a little bit of an idea where my preparation for the interview was lacking, but I don't really think I'd do much better if I went and redid the interview right now. Its something I'll keep trying to work on, but for the time being, I'm still stumped on how to deal with this sort of thing.
The second challenge I had to face during this project, and I'd say that our whole class had to face, was creating the multimedia presentation. When, in ELA class, the project and due date were announced and we were told that we had the last 30 minutes of the class to start planning, I think all of us panicked a bit. I can't speak for everyone, but at least to me, it seemed that if we didn't get at least a strong basis for our worked hashed out in those first thirty minutes, there was a very real chance we would have either an unfinished or very low quality final project come the due date. Right away, the conversation in both the room and on the shared Google Docs file we had to work on the project together on became disjointed and unproductive. I figured we needed to start moving in a common direction very soon if this was gonna work. I wanted to do something, but I had neither the ability nor the interest to take control as the leader of the project. Instead, I interjected a few key times in the closest thing to a centralized conversation that was going on in the room with ideas that I felt would allow the students who seemed to be taking lead to corral the chaos in the room. I'd say the two most important things I did were getting us to set up a list of key topics and project intentions on the doc that we could all add ideas to and then discuss, making it possible for the chaotic filling of the doc to translate to a productive vocal discussion, and pushing the idea that the project be divided into subgroups, each with their own leader, so that a few leaders could be put in charge of manageable groups instead of one person trying to control a dozen others. In the end, the project came out great. The idea lists allowed us to leave our first meeting with a clear direction for our work, and the group separation minimized the need for large, chaotic conversations and made it easy for people to be held accountable for any work they did or didn't do.
That's all for my reflection. To sum it all up, I think its fair to say I did what I'm good at well and did what I'm bad at poorly. I solved problems effectively, but has issues with social interaction. In the future, I will work on the things I struggled at, and continue to grow in the places I already excel in.
The first thing I had trouble with during this project was the interview itself. I came into it with just under 30 questions to ask my interviewee and a target time for the interview of one hour. As nervous as I was about the prospect of talking for an hour with someone I didn't know, I figured that just over two minutes per question was a pretty reasonable thing to expect, and especially considering that a lot of answers would be of above average length, I was convinced it would be a pretty straightforward affair and I had very little to worry about. I was very wrong. Fifteen minutes in, I'd exhausted the majority of my questions. Plus, I had no idea how to ad-lib, wasn't at all prepared to adjust the direction or mood of my interview to fit unexpected answers from my interviewee, and was very visibly losing my cool. In the end, thanks to my interviewee's experience with interviews and some intervention from Connor, my group's notetaker, I managed to come out with an interview about forty minutes long. Now, the questions that always follows these sorts of stories are something along the line of "What did you learn from this experience?" or "What would you do differently if you had a second chance?" To be honest, I don't know. I know now another place where my social skills need some work, and I have a little bit of an idea where my preparation for the interview was lacking, but I don't really think I'd do much better if I went and redid the interview right now. Its something I'll keep trying to work on, but for the time being, I'm still stumped on how to deal with this sort of thing.
The second challenge I had to face during this project, and I'd say that our whole class had to face, was creating the multimedia presentation. When, in ELA class, the project and due date were announced and we were told that we had the last 30 minutes of the class to start planning, I think all of us panicked a bit. I can't speak for everyone, but at least to me, it seemed that if we didn't get at least a strong basis for our worked hashed out in those first thirty minutes, there was a very real chance we would have either an unfinished or very low quality final project come the due date. Right away, the conversation in both the room and on the shared Google Docs file we had to work on the project together on became disjointed and unproductive. I figured we needed to start moving in a common direction very soon if this was gonna work. I wanted to do something, but I had neither the ability nor the interest to take control as the leader of the project. Instead, I interjected a few key times in the closest thing to a centralized conversation that was going on in the room with ideas that I felt would allow the students who seemed to be taking lead to corral the chaos in the room. I'd say the two most important things I did were getting us to set up a list of key topics and project intentions on the doc that we could all add ideas to and then discuss, making it possible for the chaotic filling of the doc to translate to a productive vocal discussion, and pushing the idea that the project be divided into subgroups, each with their own leader, so that a few leaders could be put in charge of manageable groups instead of one person trying to control a dozen others. In the end, the project came out great. The idea lists allowed us to leave our first meeting with a clear direction for our work, and the group separation minimized the need for large, chaotic conversations and made it easy for people to be held accountable for any work they did or didn't do.
That's all for my reflection. To sum it all up, I think its fair to say I did what I'm good at well and did what I'm bad at poorly. I solved problems effectively, but has issues with social interaction. In the future, I will work on the things I struggled at, and continue to grow in the places I already excel in.
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