By: Isabel Guerrero
Currently in the school of Springville, the whole middle and high school are participating in what we call “Oriole Pride Week”. Oriole Pride Week is a variety of hands-on projects that students may not be able to get a chance to do in the course of a school year through the classroom. Each class contains a mix of 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students. The class I was put in is called “Humans of Springville”. Humans of Springville is an inspiration based off of “Humans of New York”.
Humans of New York is made up of the founder Brandon Stanton and I would imagine he would now have editors, however he started by himself trying to reach his goal of 10,000 photographed New Yorkers. HoNY has become very popular via social media and now has millions of followers. Humans of Springville differs from HoNY in the aspect of people. HoNY interviews random people on the street while we have either known the people being interviewed or have been citizens of Springville that have lived here for a very long time. Aside from the people, the quote and photograph aspect remains the same. The way the students in my class got their quote was to interview them about their profession, family, and childhood. In my opinion the best way to get a quote is too dig deeper into their life and keep a conversation going about them and not constantly change subject or time period in their life. For example during an interview you wouldn’t want to jump from their childhood to the present because they might have trouble focusing or trying to think more about their answer. The only time it would be acceptable and formal is if you were comparing the two time periods and asking a question about how they differ or how they compare. The quotes from my school’s project are much shorter and more silly than the quotes from New York. Most of the quotes from New York are more like a story from this person’s life. Brandon has been working on his project for many years and has a better idea of questions to ask and how to get right to the heart. Instead of asking, “What do you do for a living?” or “How’s your day going?”, he asks “What are you most afraid of right now?” or Who is the most influential person in your life?” Although questions are important, the body language and energy that you give off is more crucial during the interview. “I’m genuinely interested in what the person has to say”, explained Stanton after being asked how he gets people to open up to him. I have learned a lot about Brandon himself and Humans of New York.
I think both projects are very interesting and even some of the interviews from Springville turned out amazing as well. I also think it is harder to get to the heart of the person being interviewed if you have previously know them and have already conversed about other things that don’t have anything to do with their past or an interesting event that happened in their life. It also might be harder to interview someone that is very young and not focused on what you’re asking. That’s why interest and attention is important while talking to someone. I know I wouldn’t want to talk and open up about my life when the person talking to me acts like they don’t want to be there and aren’t intrigued about what I have to say.
By the end of the week I will have learned many efficient ways to carry a conversation and really get to know somebody. I took a lot of interest in this project and the work of Brandon Stanton. I will continue to follow and read stories about the Humans of New York because of this class.
Humans of Springville 