Journalism

If you had told Esther in high school that she would grow up to be a high school English teacher, she would have said, “No way, I’m going to be a doctor.” “I was pretty split through high school because I was a good student,” Esther said of her academic preferences prior to college. While she enjoyed English, she felt throughout her high school years that she was better at math and science. She went into college, therefore, with an eye towards medicine and started a track to become a biology major. But such a track was not to be. In a chemistry class during the first semester of her freshman year, Esther describing feeling “stupid for the first time in my life.” In her second semester of that year, Esther took her first college English class. “It felt like home,” she said. English simply seemed like a lot less work than science, and whether or not it actually was, Esther knew it was the way she felt about each subject that made the difference. Now that she knew what sh...

Yesterday, I had my third visit to RISSE of the year! I had distributed consent forms to three girls that I know from last year, all of whom were very willing to engage in this project with me. Despite their apparent enthusiasm, however, actually interviewing them proved much more difficult than I had anticipated. Questions like, “Tell me about coming to America” or “How do you feel about your home country?” were met with “Wha…?” I quickly became frustrated and disappointed in the minimal responses I was getting and left RISSE feeling frustrated and thinking, “How am I going to get anything out of these kids?” Today, though, I can see that my frustration came from having too inflexible a mindset about what my project is. During lunch, I met an alumna of my school named Sierra who is an investigative journalist and essayist. She helped me understand that interviewing people—and perhaps especially kids—about emotional subjects is really difficult; it’s impossible to get a satisfying...