By Elena Wood, for the Chippewa Valley Post
When I first started the “Humans of the Chippewa Valley” project, I didn’t think it would turn out to be this big.
I knew we would be learning about a certain person and interviewing him or her. But what I didn’t know was that the university would be involved and there would be a whole event and that I would be writing this article!
I think it is great to be a part of something so cool and interesting.
The first step for the “Humans of the Chippewa Valley” was learning about our remarkable person. My person was somebody I already knew, but it was still great to learn more about her and how she was remarkable. We were given a thick packet we were supposed to fill out. In that packet we recorded our research and interview questions.
The first thing we were supposed to complete in the packet was the research. My partner and I only knew the basic facts about our remarkable person, so using those facts we came up with some research questions that would relate to her.
The next step to this big project was to figure out what we wanted to ask our remarkable person during the interview. We based our questions on the research we did. It was hard to come up with good questions to ask, and we took a lot of time to figure them out. My partner and I re-wrote our questions over and over to make sure they were perfect.
Before we conducted our interview, our teachers taught us how to act at the interview. They taught us how to do a good handshake, how to make it look like we are always listening during the interview, how to ask follow-up questions, how to dress for the interview, and how to communicate with the person we were interviewing. Not everyone’s interview was at the same time.
We all wrote a professional e-mail to our person to ask when he or she was available to be interviewed. The people then sent e-mails back telling us the time and place they wanted to be interviewed during school hours. Most of the interviews took place at DeLong, but some students were able to go outside of school to interview because their people wanted the students to see where they lived or worked.
Next came the most difficult part but also my favorite part: the interview. My interview was at DeLong. My partner and I both dressed up for the occasion and were really excited. Because my partner and I waited a long time for our interviewee to come we started to get nervous. (Our interviewee accidentally went to South Middle School but then realized the interview was at DeLong!)
As the interview started to get going, though, things felt much better. The interview went really well and my partner and I felt confident. Our interviewee gave us a lot of information we thought was very interesting. Before this I had never interviewed somebody. I had been interviewed myself but had not been the one asking the questions. The interview was a good experience that I learned a lot from.
After the interview we chose a quote from our remarkable person. It was hard to choose the quote because there were so many things she said that were really inspiring. Finally, my partner and I came to an agreement and chose a quote we both thought had a good message. We wrote a paragraph about our person and what we learned from the project. UW-Eau Claire took pictures of our remarkable person. Then, combining the quote we chose, the paragraph we wrote, and the picture of our remarkable person, it was all put on a poster.
The “Humans of the Chippewa Valley” was a great idea I think DeLong should repeat next year. I learned a lot from this project. One of the things I learned was that if you walk outside, you are probably seeing remarkable people everywhere you go and you just don’t realize it. You are probably remarkable, too!
Elena Wood is a sixth-grade student at DeLong Middle School. Her partner in the project was Jenna Nybroten. The “remarkable person interviewed by Elena and Jenna was Alicia Knopps, owner of the Diamond School of Dance, a business she started as a teen-ager.
* To read our first story about this project, click here. For an article about a similar project at UW-Stout, click here.