Week 11

With the new laptops becoming more and more common in the classroom, there has been less and less for me to do. The first graders went on a field trip to the zoo, which made me wish I was a six year old too. Instead, I stayed upstairs and listened to the teachers grow impatient with their students. Now more than ever I hear teachers complaining and struggling to keep their classes focused and on task. I've heard students get more unruly during a full moon, so I googled it. It's about five days until the full moon. I don't know what's wrong with these kids.

However, they're still extremely spirited and entertaining. This week, the third graders read about the Panama Canal. They had a mini-geography lesson to put the canal into context with the rest of the world. Their teacher, Mrs. H, also showed them where the Persian Gulf is because that's where she grew up. But before explicitly showing them on the map, she had the students guess where the Persian gulf was. They all seemed to think it was near California, or that it was "Middle East." One student became very interested in what kind of wildlife the Panama Canal had, insisting that there must be pandas because the name sounds similar.

There are not pandas in the Panama Canal.

I've been finishing up the final interviews for my senior research project. I interviewed two girls from Sunrise, both seniors, and a freshman boy from Liberty. I've definitely found that the older the student is, the more fluent and coherent their answers to my interview questions are. The two senior girls took over ten minutes for the entire interview, and the freshman finished it in under five. I've also found that freshmen take my questions more literally and answer from an academic perspective while older students tend to take more creative liberty in interpreting what I mean. Older students talk much more about how they've changed as people in a social context and younger students focus mainly on what they're learning in school and how their education has changed over the years.

I've also come to find that editing sucks. Editing interviews and trying to create a story line has proven to be much much harder than I originally anticipated. No two students have answers similar enough where I can put them side by side in my documentary and say "this is a definite trend." I suppose this variety is what I wanted--to obtain unfiltered opinions from high school students on their personal experiences--it just takes a long time to edit together. The only consistent answer I got was from BASIS students when I asked them what was valued more in their school: social life or academics? Everyone answered immediately with academics.

I've had some students say exactly what I've been looking for as an answer to one question and then completely go off topic during the next one, but no matter what my research yields, I'm going to be true to the students' opinions and experiences and not edit away the responses I don't agree with. I have a week left to edit them all together. My only wish is that the documentary will be coherent, but with the person I have lined up to be the voice of my narration (Landon!), I'm sure it will be.