FACE TO FACE WITH THE WORLD

Allowing Interviews To Transport & Transform Us
How Our Radio Blog Work Began...

 This blog was created in 2007 by TAMS eighth graders who left the safety of their desks behind and conducted a wide variety of interviews.

In 2007, we spoke with recent immigrants in an ESL classroom at Lyman Moore in Portland, invited adult immigrants to our high school podcast studio for longer interviews and visited the elderly at Wardwell where we taped fascinating conversations on a rainy day. We spoke to Shawna who escaped Cambodia during the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge, Minh who left Vietnam with her family in a boat that was raided by pirates on her way to safety, and a retired medic who worked on a boat in Pearl Harbor and told the students about his grim experience fishing bodies out of the water.

In 2008, 8th graders began creating a variety of content for the First Ever TAMS Radio Collection. They hit the Main Street pavement the day after the elections to get the word on the street. They went to the mall to ask shoppers about how the economy was affecting their holiday shopping and finally we went to Barber Foods to interview 10 immigrants from around the world.

As a result of these conversations, we were able to travel around the world, reach back into history and consider dreams for the future. The students showed an enormous amount of courage as they reached out to strangers and honored their stories with intense listening and questions. They also enjoyed developing communication skills and working in a real world environment beyond the classroom walls.

Now that the eighth graders have graduated to the high school, this year we will continue to develop our podcast offerings with work from 9th, 10th, 11th & 12th graders.

Friday, October 31, 2008

The Mythical Wedding that started the Trojan War

All Grade 9 students at Thornton study the Odyssey. To get eighth graders ready, we read a short version of the Iliad (the preceding story of the Trojan War) and wrote our own script about the mythical wedding that kicked off the whole war. At the end of our unit, we cooked Greek food (thanks for the cooking lessons Mrs. Zafirson!) and had a huge wedding party. Below are the movies from that day! Hopefully Homer is not rolling over in his grave, we had fun with it!
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