Remembering 9-11 through an oral history

For this project I worked with Chris C.
Chris was very young that fall, just starting 4th grade as a 9 year old. He remembers the day well though, as most of us do. His bus got to school around 9:30 and when he walked into his classroom he could tell something had happened. After asking around a student told him that a plane had hit the World Trade Center towers in NYC. He knew what these were of course having visited them with his family. He did not know anyone nor did he know anyone who knew someone who perished on that dreadful day. His father though told him later that day that he had seen it happen with his own eyes. He was driving on the highway across from New York when the towers were attacked and although he couldnt stop his car since he was on a highway he watched as the smoke and souls rose to heaven.
Something else he remembered was the amount of homework assigned that day was too much. He was up until 11 at night doing homework and his mother was one of many who wrote an angry letter to his teacher, suggesting that on a day of crisis it's best the students have no homework.
Chris and I talked for some time about our experiences with 9-11 remembering the flags and patriotism of our neighbors and we couldn't believe how Dr Chandler said it wasn't that way in the mid west. This was a very hard thing to talk about and I think next time we do oral histories maybe we can give a history of the first time we rode a bike something less painful.

rough draft short analysis

Sarah Brittain March 2013 Rough draft Short Analysis Question: how can language be used to create a comfortable and safe place, so an interviewer can get the best information possible. INTRO: there are many “moves” an interviewer can make in order to create a comfortable atmosphere. This helps the person they’re interviewing feel more at ease with the conversation, and therefore more likely to talk back. Certain language features help the conversation along and help the interviewer obtain good information. To prove this I will be analyzing two documented interviews both done by Dr. Sally Chandler. The two interviews are about very different topics and with different people, male and female. In these interviews, Dr. Chandler uses her knowledge of language use to make her interviewee feel more comfortable. The first document is an interview with a girl about the internet and how it affected her childhood. At first the girl seems nervous; she spills an answer to the first question and hesitates as if she said too much. The first thing Dr. Chandler does is ask another question pertaining to the first story told, “what did that experience do?”. The same way a psychologist gets a patient to unveil secrets, an interviewer must unlock information from the person through a series of questioning. This statement allows the girl to talk about it more and reveal what happened to her. This helps out in a great way because it makes the girl feel more comfortable, she then begins to talk more in depth about her original story. The girl still has more information to tell, another move made by Dr. Chandler is the simple act of agreeing and responding. She agrees with the statement the girl makes about how the internet can be dangerous, this act of agreeing with the interviewee helps the girl realize that she is in no way being judged. Dr. Chandler then commends the girl, “but you figured that out, you knew to hang up when you got the call”. Agreeing with the girl’s statements as well as commending her for her actions creates a level of comfort so the girl continued revealing information about what had happened, going in to further detail. Dr. Chandler continues to laugh with the girl in this comfortable environment and acquires another story about her use of the internet. Laughing creates a level of comfort that enables the person talking to feel more at ease. Dr. Chandler tells the girl that her story is “very funny” twice, to emphasize that she is not being judged at all and can continue with her stories about the internet use. This comfortable environment helps the interviewer out a lot, not just in getting answers to certain questions but also in having an interviewee return allowing you to ask more detailed questions. Dr. Chandler makes very similar language moves in her second interview with a boy about computer games. This interview is much shorter but Dr. Chandler makes different moves. She edges the boy on in a sense, to help him feel more at ease with the topic of discussion, games as a sort of software. Just as before, when the conversation first starts the boy seems nervous. Dr. Chandler resorts to commending him, telling him that he knows “lots of software”. Even still this interviewee is harder to make comfortable, he resists fully answering her questions saying he knows “what everyone else knows”. Dr. Chandler helps this situation by talking back to him and suggesting that he come up with his own specific “background” in computer software. This allows the boy to answer based on his own knowledge, knowing theres no right or wrong answer helps him feel more comfortable. He then starts giving her longer answers to her questions. Dr. Chandler has to continue to edge him on by telling him there is a connection between the games he plays and the software programs, but she insists that he finds those connections himself. By making this suggestion she is helping him see through this complex puzzle. She then makes another suggestion which helps his comfort level ad allows him to come to many conclusions on his own. It’s important for the person being interviewed to feel comfortable that way more detailed information is revealed. The moves made by Dr. Chandler helped create this level of comfort that enabled her to obtain the best information possible form her interviews. It’s not so important to maintain control during an interviewer. Whatever questions the interviewer had originally written down may never even be asked, it all depends on the person being interviewed and how comfortable they are.

Data set analysis

What is the difference in feedback between short side comments and one long comment at the end?

Codes: the codes I noticed between comments on the data sets: many of the comments do not point toward specific problems. Also a lot of them focus on what the student is doing well, even if the essay is missing the point of the assignment. The teacher also pointed out things that the student needs to change.
Categories: groups of codes: the questions posed at the end teachers comments are related. Whether its a good comment or a comment asking something to change they have the common strategy to strengthen the essay and move the student towards better grasping the assignment.
Patterns: I noticed many patterns in the teachers comments that kept coming up between the essays. For instance the comments were all one long paragraph at the bottom(as far as I can tell) in these paragraphs the instructor tells the student what works and what doesn't. I noticed that the teacher always follows up bad information with good is vice versa so the student doesn't feel too overwhelmed with bad comments. The instructor always tells them first what they are doing right.

In regards to teachers comments from my own personal experience I get better feedback from side comments, that way I know exactly what isn't working and can fix it or take it out. When a teacher writes a paragraph at the bottom of the page it makes me feel like no revision is necessary. Depending on what they say, usually they say something unspecific like "some points made seemed to get lost" or something specific like "add a theorist to strengthen your argument" the specifics make sense in a long comment but the unspecifics are lost in the length of the essay and the teachers end comment.
In data set 4 most of them, as far as I can tell, only have a comment on the bottom. For example in #4 the teacher instructs the student to "condense and expand at the same" if I got that written on my paper I wouldn't know what to cut out and what to expand on. When comments are on the side saying this doesn't work or move this to the beginning it makes revising much more tolerable because you know what to change. However perhaps the point is to not give the student the correct procedure and instead force them to figure it out themselves, that is, work out for themselves what it is in their essay which works and what doesn't work.