Letter
The first step we had to do was write a letter to a person we thought would be interesting to interview. I thought Larry, the p.e. teacher would be extremely interesting to interview because he has been teaching for so long. I wrote a letter to him asking if it was okay to interview him and some possible times I could interview him. When I gave him the letter we decided what time to do it at then.
Questions
My first idea was to ask him about how p.e. has changed over time. I started with that then I added a lot more questions, like how his childhood was different from ours, and some questions about sports. Below are my planned questions, but I asked a lot of follow up questions as well.
- How long have you been teaching for?
- How has teaching changed over the years? ex. the physical fitness test
- Why did you start teaching P.E, did something motivate you or something?
- What did you do before teaching p.e.
- What job did you want to do when you were a kid
- When did you start teaching
- Have you taught anything besides P.E.
- what was your favorite sport as a child/now
- What team were you a fan of growing up/now a fan of
- Where did you grow up
- If you didn’t teach, what job would you want to have
- Was it different when you were growing up then it is now, how was it different or not(Did you have different classes, where the classes different or just overall different)
- Do you like teaching or would you prefer to do something else if you could
Interview
The third step was to interview your person, and ask them all the questions you had. We also had to record it so we could listen to it after the interview was over. I asked him around 25 questions in total including my pre-planned ones. Larry was very helpful by giving me as much possible information in every answer, which saved me from having to ask some of the follow up questions sometimes.
Step 2
After we interviewed the person we had to fill out a document to help us write the final piece. I wrote down the most interesting parts of the interview in certain boxes saying beginning, middle or end so I would have an easier time writing the final piece. I didn’t write the ending on here because I was having trouble with it on first, but when I started putting the whole thing together, I made the end so it flowed in with everything else
YOUR INTERVIEW PAPER
Once you’ve conducted and recorded your interview, rather than copying down every single word, you should take a very close look to find the most interesting responses. Jot down some of the most interesting bits here.
| He has been teaching at LREI for 33 years, doing p.e.
He went to one of the first Mets games at the Polo Grounds and one of the first Titans games, before they were the Jets, also at the Polo Grounds. He grew up in Brooklyn and went to public school there, all of his friends lived on the same block as him He became a Oakland Raiders fan because there quarterback, Ken Stabler, was a lot like him, left handed and bad knees His parents would give him 3$ to go to a Mets game, it cost 30 cents to ride the subway there and back, the ticket was 1.25 and the rest was for a hot dog, soda, and a box of cracker jack |
- Was there something that surprised you?
- Are there different answers from different questions that you feel have a connection?
- Are there bits of information that you can chunk?
- What do you think the reader would find the most interesting to answer, “Who the heck are you?”
STRUCTURE:
THE BEGINNING
- You will have 3 sections to your interview — a beginning, middle and end. It’s up to you to decide how you want to chunk your information.
- Your paper should be two pages long.
- You should have 3-6 quotations. At least 1 or 2 in each section.
- How will you grab the reader’s attention? How will you begin your paper? Your beginning should include a grabber statement about your interviewee. Will it be a direct quote? An unusual fact that you learned about him/her? Jot down some ideas here:
| We all know Larry as our great P.E. teacher, but did you know he used to teach reading to kids who couldn’t read very well at a Board of Education High School? Did you know that Larry went to one of the Mets and Titans’(Jets) games? Did you know Larry thinks teaching P.E. is the “…best job in the world”? “I love working with kids, and what would be better than playing games and sports with kids all day?” |
THE MIDDLE
The middle is the bulk of your interview; this is where your reader will find out the most information about your interviewee. Jot down some ideas for the middle of your interview.
| Larry grew up in Brooklyn during the 50’s and 60’s. He has spent his whole life living in Brooklyn except for 2-3 months when he went to California to work at a friends business. He and everyone on his block went to the same public school. His two best friends lived across the street from him, one also called Larry. Everyone on his block would walk to school together.
I asked Larry how it was different growing up then it is now? He said the money was really different. Movies were 60 cents, Mets tickets were 1.25 and a subway ride was 15 cents. “The other thing that was different was that there was less people. You know, it just wasn’t as crowded. The city seems very crowded these days. There were less people around, more kids played in the streets, there was no video games, DVD players, there was none of that stuff. When I grew up there was no color T.V. All television shows where in black and white. So, that was a big difference when I was growin up too,” Larry said. Larry grew up in Brooklyn. He went to a public school, the same one as everyone else on his block. quote about how everyone on his block went to the same school, part with fat larry and skinny larry. He would go to Mets games with only $3 with him. It would only cost 30 cents for the subway there and back, 1.25 for the ticket, and 1.45 for a soda, cracker jack and hot dog. include part about how there was a smaller population… Larry was 8 when the Titans started as the Jets in 1959. He went to one of their first games at the Polo Grounds. He was 11 when the Mets started in 1962. He went to one of their first games as well, also at the Polo Grounds. Around that time between 1959-1962 the Titans, Yankees, Giants, Titans (giants/ maybe dodgers) played at the Polo Grounds. They all shared the same stadium because it cost to much for every team to have separate ones. He was a Giants football fan before the Titans came into play. His favorite player was the quarterback called Y.A. Tittle. As he got older, he became a bigger fan of a quarterback named Ken Stabler because…. quote about why he liked them w/ ken stabler. Larry has been teaching for 38 years in total. He has taught pe at LREI for 33 years. He used to only teach sports, but now he does the physical fitness test, all types of games and still the sports. He taught for 5 years at a Board of Education High School to kids who couldn’t read very well. Before teaching he worked at an afterschool community center, and even before that he was a postman. Childhood Stuff
Job
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Final paper
Below is my final paper. I wrote it so it was like a biography of what Larry told me, in order from childhood until he got older. I’m very proud of it because I wrote most of it on my own, only little edits from other people.
Who the Heck is Larry?
by, Freddie
We all know Larry as our great P.E. teacher, but did you know he used to teach reading to kids who couldn’t read very well at a Board of Education High School? Did you know that Larry went to one of the first Mets and Titans (Jets) games at the Polo Grounds? Did you know Larry thinks teaching P.E. is the, “…best job in the world,”? “I love working with kids, and what would be better than playing games and sports with kids all day?”
Larry grew up in Brooklyn during the 50’s and 60’s. He has spent his whole life living in Brooklyn except for a few months when he went to California to work at a friend’s business. When he was younger, everyone on his block went to the same public school. That sounded really important to me, because then he had the same friends while growing up, he didn’t lose any of them. His two best friends lived across the street from him, one also called Larry. “Right across the street, two of my best friends(lived). One of my best friends was also called Larry, he was a big fat kid he was called fat Larry and I was called skinny Larry,” he said. All of his friends on his block would walk to school together. If they got to school early, they would go to a park where they would play basketball until school started. All of my friends live in different neighborhoods, so I thought that it would be really cool to have them live near me.
Larry was a big sports fan growing up. When he was a teenager his favorite player in football was a quarterback named Ken Stabler who was on the Oakland Raiders. Larry liked him because, “…their quarterback was a lot like me. He had bad knees, he was left handed, and he had a beard and long hair. I said, ‘Gee, that guy looks like me!’” Before Larry liked Ken Stabler he was a fan of Y.A. Tittle, the quarterback of the New York Giants.
The Money was a lot different in the 50’s and 60’s. Movies were 60 cents, Mets tickets were $1.25 and a subway ride was 15 cents. “The other thing that was different was that there was less people. You know, it just wasn’t as crowded. The city seems very crowded these days. There were less people around, more kids played in the streets, there was no video games, DVD players, there was none of that stuff. When I grew up there was no color T.V. All television shows where in black and white. So, that was a big difference when I was growing up too,” Larry said. That made me wonder if there was not as big of a population now, that kids would play outside more and not use X-Boxes all day, or if the X-Box would even exist.
Larry said school when he was growing up was a lot different than it is now. During his junior high school and middle school years he took a shop class. He took a class in ceramics, in metal work, and woodshop. He said the other classes were the same except he had separate english and history teachers, which would be like having Dave teach only english and Lynne teach only history. There was no humanities class.
Larry has been teaching for 38 years in total. He has taught P.E. at LREI for 33 years. He used to only teach sports, but now he does the physical fitness test, all types of games and still plays sports. He taught for 5 years at a Board of Education High School before LREI to kids who couldn’t read very well. Before teaching he also worked at an afterschool community center, organizing games there. Even before that, he was a postman. He didn’t like being a postman because he didn’t get to work with kids.
Larry Kaplan has a fascinating life. I wanted to interview Larry, because I knew he grew up at a different time than me, so I could infer that his childhood was different than mine. I knew from when we studied times around them in 4th grade, and learned how it was really different in the 1900’s than it is now. I used to think that Larry had only been a PE teacher, but now I know that he taught reading, worked at an afterschool program and was even a postman. We are lucky to have Larry as our amazing PE teacher, and not as our postman.