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.