These last few weeks have been a bit surreal. Can’t say I ever thought that I’d possibly be living through a pandemic.

While school should be a good distraction from what’s going on, this project made me miss my kids immensely. The new directions coming from OSPI gives me the impression that it will end up being longer than anticipated before we see them again. But, if there is any bright side to this, it’s the fact that I no longer have an alarm waking me up every morning. I also quite like being able to start work at 10am instead of having to pretend that I’m ready for the day at 7:30 in the morning; no one is ready for the day at 7:30!

Anyways, the idea behind this story was a spark of genius on Misty’s part; create a story about what AVID is based upon the kids who have actually been a part of the program. The whole idea was that the clip could be used during registration so that, instead of the counselors misrepresenting what we do, the AVID kids can give the reality behind what it is we do. Jenevive, my co-coordinator, and I picked 5 amazing AVID kids that have been in the program for nearly their whole middle school career and put together a list of 6 questions that we wanted them to answer. We interview them 23 hours later, so they really didn’t have a ton of time to prepare. We asked the kids the following questions:

1. What do we do in AVID?
2. How would you describe AVID to someone else?
3. How would you describe yourself before being in AVID? How would you describe yourself after being in AVID?
4. What impact do you feel AVID has had on you as a student?
5. What impact do you feel AVID has had on you as a person?
6. Why have you decided to stay in AVID/be a part of the AVID class?

We pulled them out of their 5th period class and sat down at a circular table to interview them. I recorded the kids using the Voice Memos app on my work Mac. This was a new experience for me. I know that there are some people out there that record nearly everything they do; I am the opposite of that. I hate appearing on video and having my voice recorded. I have a very vivid memory during my student teaching where my evaluator told me that I needed to work on my voice. According to her feedback, it’s far too high pitched and she couldn’t listen to it for more than 10 minutes. I think that coupled with being asked “is your mommy home” when I answer the phone (yes, that still happens, and I’m in my 30’s) has caused me to go to great lengths to avoid recordings.

Anyways, I’ve digressed. We decided while doing the interviews that I would ask the question and then the kids would go around the table and answer. They decided that each time a question was asked, a different person would start with their answer. I decided that it would be easiest for me if I recorded each question individually instead of the entire thing as one long interview. I learned that when using the Voice Memos app, in order to actually save the audio you need to drag and drop it into the desktop. You can find all of the AVID Interviews on my Soundcloud.

After getting their responses, I knew I wouldn’t have enough time to put their answers for all of the questions, so I decided to pick just a few. I knew for a fact I wanted the “What do we do in AVID?” and “How would you describe AVID to someone else?” to be included, since that was the main point of us doing the interview. I also really liked their answers for what impact AVID had on them as a person, so I decided to go with that one as well. Lastly, I decided that we needed to include the introductions so that the kids listening will know who is speaking and what their experience is what AVID.

When I put those 4 clips together it ended up being over 11 minutes of audio, so I definitely had a lot of cutting down that I needed to do in order to get it under 3 minutes. As I went to cut the clips I made the decision that I wasn’t going to cut any of the kids responses, you would hear from all 5 of them for each question. I know that they don’t always have the best answers and sometimes they’re redundant, but I felt like keeping all of them in was more authentic.

Most of the editing came in using the razor tool. I used it to cut long periods of silence where the kids stopped to think. I also used it to cut some of our less important chatter, because occasionally we would go off topic. I deleted the unnecessary clips and moved the remaining clips together to create the rough draft.

After the rough draft, I had to edit it down some more because it was too long. Valerie suggested changing the order of the questions, so I moved the “how would you describe AVID” to be the 2nd question asked. I also changed the order of a few of the kids responses. When it was asked how AVID impacted them as people, I moved Umar’s response to the front. I felt like that was a better flow, because his exclamation felt weird being at the end of the responses. There were also a few places where the audio felt choppy, so I overlapped the clips a bit to make a smoother transition.

After rearranging all the clips, the next thing that I focused on was trying to get all of the voices to be more similar in volume. I noticed that my voice was very loud and clear, where as Umar and Stephanie’s responses tended to be more quiet. To achieve this, I used the move tool to create dots on the volume bar. I would make sure to always place four dots, two at the beginning of the person speaking and two at the end. By moving just one dot before the speaker and one dot after, I was able to change the volume of just that part of the clip. When clips had my voice, I lowered the volume by about 2.5 decibels, which brought it down to a more similar volume as the students. There was one place where I had to bring it down a lot more. The “So” when I called out Umar for some reason was incredibly loud, so I had to take that one down about 15 decibels. For Umar and Stephanie’s responses I raised the decibels by about 2.5.

Here is the final product:

There are some other really great responses from the kids that I wasn’t able to fit in, so I think that I am going to make a slightly longer version that we’ll use when registering. My principal is already really happy though that we have something to use, since it looks like registration will be basically occurring online and the students have to do it on their own this year.

Once again my inspiration for this project came in the form of Misty guiding me (she’s the real MVP).

For the last 4 years I’ve been an AVID elective teacher. If you don’t know what AVID is, it’s a program that started in California awhile back that had the intent to close the achievement gap and getting underrepresented students the skills that they needed to be successful in high school and college. Being an AVID elective teacher basically means that I teach a class on how to be responsible (how do you keep your materials organized, how to manage your time, how to ask proper questions, how to interact with people in acceptable manner, etc.). We also spend some time learning transferable skills, like how to format different writing structures so that they can apply to multiple forms of writing. As an adult you’re probably thinking “that’s fantastic! So many kids need those skills!”. I whole heartedly agree, otherwise I wouldn’t consider teaching this type of class. However, our dilemma comes in convincing kids that this is an important class that they should take. Let’s face it, very few 11 year-olds want to take a class about how to be responsible and grown up, especially when they can take a class instead that allows them to launch rockets and create catapults, and I totally don’t blame them. This means that every year, when class registration rolls around, we always run into issues.

Not only is my AVID class up against basic kid nature to avoid responsibility in favor of fun, but AVID is CONSTANTLY misrepresented by our counselors!

They tell the kids that:

1. AVID is a study hall.
2. AVID is a class that goes on field trips.
3. All the AVID teacher does is help you with work from your other classes. If you’re stuck on an assignment, they will spend the class telling you how to solve it.

This is such a misrepresentation of what we do in AVID! It forces me to have battles in my classroom with apathetic students because they got into a class that was falsely sold to them. Nothing kills the progress of an AVID class faster than a kid that just doesn’t want to be there. Seriously, one kid can put such a damper on the entire system and experience for the rest of the kids. This is something that I battle with the counselors on every year, and it constantly falls on deaf ears.

I’ve asked in the past if I could go represent AVID when we register our students so I can say what we actually do in AVID, we take current AVID kids so they can share their stories, etc. The district has always agreed that those are good ideas, but so far they are unwilling to implement any of them.

Which brings us to where I am now. I have been out of work for a week; quarantined to my house for health issues not related to COVID. 8am on Wednesday morning I am wallowing in my lack of time, expressing to Misty how desperately I need a topic for my rough draft that I must complete in approximately 48 hours. Misty made the connection that this audio story can bridge our AVID registration issue gap; that if I can’t be there in person and we can’t take AVID kids, then I can use the audio story to tell our tale. Running off that spark of genius, I had 50 free minutes to brainstorm with my AVID co-coordinator Jenevive (since this would benefit her too) and we organized what we needed to get this project done. We came up with a list of 6 questions we wanted to ask the AVID kids, and then picked 5 fantastic AVID students, ones that we’ve been working with for the last 2-3 years, that we wanted to interview. We gave the kids less than 24 hours to get their ideas together about their AVID experience and what they want others to know about AVID. Then the following day we pulled them from their 5th period class and sat at a table as a small AVID family to have a discussion about what we wanted other people to know about AVID.

I ended up with a good 20-30 minutes worth of audio (which I posted each individual question interview on SoundCloud). To start with the rough draft I chose the questions that I felt like had the most relevance to what we wanted kids registering to know. Then I just listened to the clips repeatedly and tried to pick out the pieces I liked. I tried not to cut any answers, just cut down on the “umm” and “like” the kids kept repeating, while cutting down the long stretches of silence.

Currently I have created:

I don’t know how engaging it will be to a group of 5th graders, but I feel like it’s at least a good start for the message we want to get across.

Audition Tutorial #1

Audition Tutorial #2