When Andy and I paired off, we went into a corner of the room and sat on one of the benches. With so many people in the classroom, I anticipated it would be difficult to keep his attention; however, this was not really ever an issue. Andy was very attentive, listening to me each time I spoke, nodding, or shrugging. It was what Andy didn’t do that made unsettled me in our time together: he ignored making eye contact.
I asked Andy to tell me about the person he interviewed and why he picked that profession. Andy decided to interview Eddy, a bouncer for a nightclub. I assumed that Andy would be filled with things to tell me about Eddy. Nope. Actually, when I planned for a couple minute discussion about the bouncer, Andy said, “I don’t remember our interview.” Next plan. I asked, “Why did you want to interview a bouncer in the first place?” Andy shrugged. This was going to be a long session.
I decided to dive into the text since I wasn’t getting any real responses from Andy about his own project. We started by looking through the rubric, talking about voice, organization, and flow more than anything. After realizing that the rubric seemed a bit too abstract without writing to critique, I decided to have us read the actual narrative first. I’m not really sure I would do that again—maybe the transcription was a better place to start--but Andy did respond more to my questions about the jazz singer. Reading aloud was slow, but we stopped after each paragraph and I asked Andy about what he liked in the writing, how well it was done (did it flow? Was it organized?). His answers were always short and still he did not look at me when he responded.
It was a bit unsettling because I didn’t want to be the one talking the whole time. I wasn’t really able to find questions that engaged him enough to get to that point. I started pointing out some of the stuff I had hoped Andy would see and asked him if he thought the same thing or saw it a different way. It was at this point that Andy actually started giving me longer responses, talking about how he may want to tell about a specific day in the bouncer’s life rather than the broad narrative of the jazz singer. He asked me where Russia was, and we chatted about that for a little while, but things started to die down again.
So, rather than me talking the whole time, I decided to abandon ship: I decided to move away from academics and ask Andy what kind of profession he is interested in. “I want to be a football player. I like football. I’m good at it. Either that or boxing. That’s my back up. Oh, I’m good at rap too. I like to make songs and write them down.” Andy finally started to talk. So, we talked about what he wanted. And after he told me that he was a Green Bay Packers fan, and I called him a “cheese head” he actually looked me in the eye and said, “Yeah, well, I don’t wear that though.” I don’t know if I would really do things differently, but I do think that it was a good idea overall to get Andy talking on other subjects. It was good to see Andy come to life with his responses, but I need to figure out how to make that happen sooner, and with the assignment.
No comments:
Post a Comment