Interview Blogpost

During the month of October, news reporter for Russia Today, Sean Thomas, came in to talk to eighth grade students about journalism. On the first day when Mrs. Strydhorst-Piers told us about this unit I was really scared. How do you find reliable sources? How is news made? How do you find an interviewee? What topic would I do? How much did I have to know about the topic? By Halloween Sean Thomas had helped me build my foundation for journalism. I narrowed down my topic from a topic to an angle to a question. Lastly, I learnt what do ask my interviewee and how to pick an interviewee. Instead of a simple yes or no question like, “did you eat breakfast today?”, we learnt to write open ended questions. For example you could ask your interviewee, “why did you eat for breakfast today?”

The proper interview posture :)

Once I was done with all the hard work of doing research and writing questions based on my topic. I needed to find an interviewee who had background knowledge on my topic. For example if my topic was the importance of physical exercise I could interview a P.E. teacher like Mr. Bildfell. I finally picked to interview Dr. Rogers. I picked Dr. Rogers for many reasons, but she was one of the only teachers that hd been at SAS ever since she was in school! This would help me to compare how SAS was back then to now days.

During this unit I learnt that interviewing can be scary and intimidating. You need to have questions that challenge and show the opinion of your interviewee. My interview was at first stressful, but after we got talking, I realized that I was prepared for this. I had taken time to research my topic and write 10 open-ended questions. However, I didn't follow the exact script that I had planned out, I started to ask follow up questions, mirror my interviewee's answers, and integrated statistics into the conversation.

It’s quite interesting to see and learn about other people’s perspectives of sleep and the SAS start time. I never knew that Mrs. Rogers was such a big advocate for sleep and only absolutely critical homework. Before all the research I did on my topic, I never knew about the effects on humans with little sleep. I learnt about melatonin levels, hours of healthy sleep, and how sleep impacts the function of your brain and body. Lastly, it was fascinating to see Mrs. Rogers apply her knowledge of sleep to my interview questions and our daily lives. This helped me connect with my topic in a more captivating way.

Sean Thomas taught us that reporters are only meant to share information with the world, not their opinion. But if I could biased, I would tell my readers that sleep is vital to your health. Students need nine and a half hours of sleep daily. If they don’t get an adequate amount of sleep then their body and brain will be affected. SAS’s 8 AM start time isn’t inhumane and unreasonable. However, with student’s busy schedule regarding homework and after school activities, I think it would be more beneficial for SAS to start at 9 AM. But on the other hand, students should be able to balance social media with their homework, reflecting on the hours of sleep that they get daily.

Overall, I was really proud of myself and what I was able to accomplish. I went from not knowing how to find an angle to conducting a 10 minute interview. If I could change one thing about my project, I would tell myself to breath in and out three times before I went into room M124 and started my interview. If I had relaxed a little more, I think that I would've done a whole lot better.