Earlier this year, in December PLP had its winter exhibition. Last year if you’ve seen my older blog posts from grade 9 you’d know that we had one last year too.

These exhibitions are meant to demonstrate our understanding of our learning gas and show of the skills we have learned and overall just to challenge us. Last year the theme for our exhibition was Harry Potter and we were to make our own inquiry questions and answer it through a project, you can see my blogpost for that here. This year in grade 10 the project was very different, for the past couple weeks we had been learning about the importance of story’s and how everyone has important stories. The main point of these teaching was that during the exhibition the grade 10’s and 12’s would be partnered up, the grade 10’s would be interviewing three visitors that would come to the exhibition. The grade 12’s job were to find these people for our interviews. In preparation we had to have a list of questions to ask, these questions could be anything but they had to tell an important story that the interviewees would have. This was quite challenging as we had no idea who these people were and what stories they would have. We learned about how to ask questions and how to make your questions more open to the people that you would be interviewing, we also learned about follow up questions so that you could show your interest in the interviewees story. We learned about all of these from StoryCorps, its a website where people tell their personal interesting stories, there is a interviewer who could be anyone. I’ve seen stories where a father will interview his son or a couple will ask each other questions but the most common one is where a guest will come to StoryCorps and tell their story to a member of StoryCorps. These stories can be very personal and sad or very light and funny. It’s very interesting to listen to these short stories as they mean so much to that person. It may sound easy to interview someone but it was actually quite hard, we had to come up with these questions and meet people we have never met before, personally I’m a very shy person and I didn’t know how I would do at the exhibition.

The Exhibition: It took a while for my partner Chloe to find me a interviewee, but after she had found me an interviewee it was actually pretty easy. In all I got two interviews and both where very interesting. The first interview I got was with an elderly lady, she talked about her life experiences with moving from England to Canada and how it changed her life. I could really relate to her as my parents are both from England and moved to Canada around twenty years ago. We talked for about ten to fifteen minutes and I was surprised of how enjoyable it was, everyone we interviewed that night shared three personal stories with us grade tens and it was very interesting just talking with people I would usually talk to. The second person I interviewed was my friend Alex’s dad Daryl. We talked about how having children has changed his life and how it has impacted him as a person, it was quite interesting to me as one day I’d like to have children of my own and just hearing his experiences was very enjoyable. I used my second interview for the final product as my first interview had a lot of background noise and I just found my second one more enjoyable and interesting to listen to. While editing the podcast I added music in the begging and the end so it adds a little intro. I created my own music in Garage Band with the live loops feature, you listen to my interview here.

Within this project I improved a lot on my public speaking skills and just being more comfortable in front of new people, I also learned a lot about how to use and find good interview questions and how to properly use follow up questions to further the interview. I had a lot of fun with this project and I hope we do something like this again At is was genuinely fun and interesting.