Who The Heck Are You? 

Writing The Letter

Recently, in class, we have been doing a project called Who The Heck Are You? In this project we have been focusing on interviewing someone either in this L.R.E.I. community or a family member. I chose Lizbeth, a teacher in the Lower School. She runs something called Early Birds, which is if you are in the lower school and you get to school early and you need somewhere to go, you can go to Early Birds. I used to go to Early Birds everyday. The first step of this project was choosing who we wanted to interview and writing a letter to them. I knew I wanted to interview Lizbeth, and went straight to writing a letter to her. I chose Lizbeth because I knew her well but didn’t know much about her past.  In the letter I explained the project we were working on, and explained why I wanted to interview her. I talked about how I think that a lot of people wanted to know about her. I was right, considering that I wasn’t the only one interviewing Lizbeth. Click here to see my choices for people I wanted to interview.

Questions

Once I had sent my letter to Lizbeth and she had responded saying good times for us to meet, I started brainstorming questions to ask her. I mostly wanted to know about her life before she came to New York, and tried to make that the main focus of my questions. In conclusion, I focused all of my questions on just trying to get to know Lizbeth. Click here for my questions

Interview

I interviewed Lizbeth on a Wednesday, next to her office. I used my phone to record all of the things she said. I learned a lot about Lizbeth didn’t know before. Did you know she won volleyball championships? That she was born and raised in Lima, Peru? Do you know that she considers her job she has now her dream job? I didn’t know any of this walking into the interview. She told me interesting stories about her life before working here at L.R.E.I. that I didn’t know about before.

Step 2 Doc

The next step in making this Who The Heck Are You? piece was to get together my main ideas from our interviews. Dave, our teacher shared with us a document that helped us with exactly that. We started by listening to our interview, and finding the important parts and jotting them down as the main ideas. We then looked at that and created grabber statements, and closing statements. The hardest part for me was the grabber statement. I started with the grabber statement What is it like to grow up in Lima, Peru? but then with a little help from my writing partner, I changed it to Have you ever been to Lima, Peru?  I am really happy with the way it turned out. Click here to see my Step 2 Doc

Final Piece

Finally after creating a letter, thinking of questions, conducting and interview and completing the Step 2 doc, I could start working on my Final Who The Heck Are You? piece. It took a while, but it was really fun. We also participated in a peer editing study. We edited our partner’s work and we were partaking in a study. Click here to see my Final Piece