The Winter Exhibition. It’s an inevitable part of PLP and has become a fact of life for us who have been doing it for the past few years as you can see below.
8th GRADE
And
9th GRADE
This year was pretty different for the grade 10s as we did something completely different from previous years… Something that would get us in trouble under normal circumstances… We didn’t have a project for the exhibition…
Instead, the exhibition kind of was our project. Here’s what I mean about that.
Since grade eight, winter exhibitions were a time where we would create a project based off of a certain theme. In eighth grade, our theme was Star Wars and in ninth grade, it was Harry Potter. Although the case was the same for the eighth and ninth graders this year, the grade tens and twelves were given a different kind of project for the exhibition. We were making a podcast.
If it hasn’t become evident in my blogs, tenth grade has been all about PODCASTS. We went from knowing nothing about podcasts…
To knowing something about podcasts.
We improved a lot as a class in the four months that we had been doing podcasts. We were progressively coming up with bigger and better podcasts and it seemed like a good time to step up our game. It was time to get into interviews. Now, interviews aren’t really an unfamiliar topic for us and even since grade nine, we’ve been encouraged to start implementing it into our work. On top of podcasts, we were also familiarizing ourselves with interviews as it was clear that it wasn’t a big strong-suit for many of us. A few weeks before the exhibition, we focusing on the idea of how everyone has a story and how we can get those stories out of them through interviews. We spent quite a bit of time looking at a site called StoryCorps which was essentially an online archive with thousands of stories from thousands of different people. This is what one was like…
This set the tone for our build-up to the exhibition as we would be creating two other podcasts before the big exhibition podcast. Luckily, I wasn’t going to be doing this alone…
Earlier I mentioned that the grade twelves were also going to be straying from traditional exhibition standards. They were going to be working with us.
My man, Michael Fourie, assisted me throughout this whole project and he even had the job of being my first interviewee! Here’s how it went…
Having a grade twelve work with you is great. Having that grade twelve share the same strengths with you is great. Having a grade twelve share the same weaknesses? Maybe not so great. Michael and I are very similar in the way we work and like to get things done and when it came to our very first podcast where I would be interviewing him, we planned out the whole interview the way we would normally plan one out. Our first problem was that we shouldn’t have planned it out to the extent we did.
See, the whole point to doing that first interview was to train ourselves for the exhibition where we would be interviewing people we didn’t know which means we had to have a flexible plan for our interviews. Michael and I had came up with a whole structure for our interview, from start to finish. This kind of defeated the point, so we revised our plan to become much more broad and we recorded our interview. Although we both think it was an OK start to the interviewing process, we still sounded a little bit scripted as we had gotten ourselves in a “mental rut” for the interview. That was something I would have to look out for in the next interviews. Speaking of “the next interviews,” time for podcast two!
For this podcast, I would be interviewing a family member. I ended up interviewing my dad and talking to him about his time doing his MBA in university. Check it out!
I don’t have all that much to say about this one as I feel like it was a pretty decent podcast to say the least. I talk to my parents a lot and they’ve shared countless, reallllly interesting stories. My problem was that we would also probably fall into that same “mental rut” that Michael and I experienced in our interview so I made sure to get a story that I hadn’t heard before. This meant a story that my dad didn’t usually tell because of his large selection of other crazy stories. This isn’t to say it wasn’t interesting as it was actually interesting to learn about his story in the MBA and I actually got a pretty good interview out of him which was great for me as I really needed that extra experience for the upcoming “exhibition interview bonanza.” For that, I was really glad that I got to interview my dad. And with that, it was time for the big night…
Ah, the exhibition. Coming into it this year, the exhibition seemed like a familiar face in a crowd as this time, we weren’t going to be partaking in the same kind of exhibition goodness that we usually did. Instead, I paired up with Michael and Sam to create a recording studio where we would be recording people that our grade twelve picked out for us. As Michael and Sam were partners, we took shifts switching between interviewers, so I got to record one interview, then Sam or Michael would record another, and so on and so forth.
We ended up getting the the textiles room which was definitely not the worst room to get and we were all pleased when we got that room. Although it was a great room to record in, it needed a complete remodelling so we ended up transforming a room filled with chairs, tables, and sewing machines to this…
It was definitely a picturesque place to record a podcast interview so without further adieu, here’s my exhibition podcast!
For me, this interview was gold for me as it was definitely the calm vibe I was looking for and my interviewee really felt passionate about her story which improved the quality of the podcast a lot. I also felt like it was my best performance as an interview out of the three I ended up recording that night. In terms of feedback, there really wasn’t much aside from a little detail and the addition of intro and ending music. Here’s what my final draft looks like with the added details to my podcast!
This whole process of making the podcasts was definitely a completely different experience for me. The different aspects of this whole project definitely presented me with many learning curves that I got over throughout the course of a few weeks. From the unique experience of working with a grade twelve, to interviewing complete strangers, I definitely grew in my ability to communicate with other people as it really taught me to listen to others and develop meaningful conversations with complete strangers.
Although there’s definitely room for improvement in all of these podcasts, I think that I got half of a slam-dunk for this project as the execution could have been better, but the learning was really valuable.
What do you think?
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