The Roadblocks and Rewards of Interviewing

Interviews are hard!

I’d like to think that I’m a fairly sociable person. I’ve definitely gotten better at talking to people over the years. When I was a kid in elementary and middle school, I was terribly shy. This persisted even into High School, but I think I finally started to come into my own towards my junior and senior years. I have less anxiety talking to people now more than ever, and it’s something I actually enjoy a lot, whether that be deeper conversations to just shooting the breeze.

I entered this experience initially thinking that an interview would be just that, a conversation. Which, in a sense, is true, because an interview is a conversation. However, after reading sample literacy interviews in preparation for my own, and now thinking more on the topic after my own experiences, it’s safe to say that it’s a little more intricate than that. The interviewer has to prepare and provide questions that will be able to generate a discussion, and be open to having the interviewee take the conversation in a different direction, and realize when this might be more productive. It’s a much more productive form of conversation I would say, because the end result is to try and generate something that effectively relates an experience, answers a question, provides something more tangible in the form of dialogue.

I chose to interview my younger sister about her experiences with speech therapy during Kindergarten through 1^st grade, and how these experiences affected her relationship with reading and writing both in the past and the present. My sister is 14 now, she’s a freshman in high school, and it was asking her to think back on experiences that happened about 10 years ago for her. It was surprising to me how much detail she could recall about those instances, but they say that the experiences you remember the most were the ones that affected you the most. I can’t really remember general details about 10 years ago, but certain events that were important to me I can still close my eyes, and it’s almost like I’m there again. Memory is a remarkable thing, and part of the reason I knew this was going to be worthwhile is because I knew these memories were important for my sister, that they needed to be shared.

Because my sister had never been interviewed before and I myself had never conducted and interview, we both decided it would be best If I provided her with the questions beforehand. I gave her about an hour to look it over, and then we began the interview. She was nursing a bit of a sore throat, and after asking her if she wanted to postpone it, she decided she was up for it after some tea. The interview began.

Looking back on it, the interview went really well, and having to type up the audio recording into a transcript made me realize this. In the moment though, I was really nervous, and felt that I maybe wasn’t providing enough direction for my sister, or that I wasn’t asking very good questions or follow up questions. In reality,

The most profound moment of the whole interview came at the very end, and it might not have happened had I not had the spur of the moment thought. At the end of the interview, I thought that I might have overcompensated from before, and steered my sister along too much, maybe not giving her as much opportunity to speak. So, in that moment, I thought to do just that. I asked her before I stopped the recording if she wanted to say anything that she wanted.

And say something she did. She spoke from the heart, talking about how all of her academic life has been hard and how she continues to struggle on a daily basis, but she works, and works, and works, to try and keep up with her peers. I had never seen this aspect of my sister before. I knew from watching her study for hours and hours in middle school that she worked hard, but sometimes you need to hear someone speak about things to know how difficult they really were. I stopped the recording, and there honestly wasn’t any words between us after that. I gathered my things, reassured her that it turned out great, and thanked her again.

This interview was enlightening in so many ways. It showed me just how much reform is needed in our education system, the immense amount of work that teachers do, the struggles of students who have learning disabilities and how their voices are often not heard by their teachers, how some people are just considered “not as good,” at certain subjects, like they will never be able to produce writing of substance. It left me wondering what comes next, what is there to be done? That I don’t think is a question that I think I can adequately answer in the span of this blog, but at the very least, the problems and struggles my sister faced became all the more present and real to me.

Interviews are hard, but what I’ve learnt is that sometimes spontaneity is key. You are interviewing someone because they have a story to tell, so let them tell it, even if that means letting go of direction or putting aside some questions that you once thought would be beneficial. When people have something that they are dying to tell, they will find the right words to let it be heard, no prompt necessary.