Читать книгу Listen Wise - Monica Brady-Myerov - Страница 10

In the stories below, your students will be able to hear the emotion. You might spark reflective conversation after listening to the story together with some general follow-up questions: How do you think the person in the story feels? What emotions do you think that person is feeling by listening to the tone of their voice? What do pauses sometimes tell you about how a person is feeling? Do you think your voice sounds different whether you are happy or sad?

Elementary School Students: The story “50 Years After She Was Struck By Lightning, Reconnecting With The Girl Who Saved Her” is a conversation between two older women who have an emotional reunion. [1]

Middle/High School Students: The story “Trying Not To Break Down—A Homeless Teen Navigates Middle School” is full of emotion from a boy who is homeless and working hard to succeed in school and life. [2]

The story “How a Stuffed Toy Monkey Reunited a Holocaust Survivor with Relatives” is a moving conversation between a father and son about what really happened to his family during the Holocaust. [3]

The audio and additional teaching resources can be found at https://listenwise.com/book.

It's hard to get the same kind of intimate connection through just the written word. In fact, it might take a paragraph to explain in detail the emotion someone expressed in one word through their voice. And it will never capture what it sounded like to actually be there.

Previously, I studied abroad in Kenya and lived in Nairobi for the summer working as an intern for Reuters, a leading international wire service. As an intern, I mostly organized files and typed up stories from reporters calling in from the field. But one day, Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun, now a saint, who worked with the poor came to Nairobi to meet with city officials to ask them to give her mission free municipal water. Reuters sent me to cover her visit to the Missionary of Charity Order in a heavily populated poor area of the city. Armed with my notebook only, because Reuters didn't have an audio service (or a podcast), I set out. Even though I didn't record Mother Teresa, I will never forget her calm, quiet, soothing voice amid the chaos of the noisy neighborhood. She was a petite woman, dressed as always in her white with blue-striped nun's habit. Physically she didn't command attention. But her sure, strong voice did.

After graduating, I returned to Nairobi, Kenya, this time as an audio journalist.

My time as a freelancer in Kenya was a launch pad into audio storytelling as I covered East Africa for Voice of America and other shortwave stations. It was during a tumultuous time in Kenya's history under a fairly new democratic government. Kenya was a British colony until it became fully independent in 1963. In 1982, the government amended the constitution, making Kenya officially a one-party state. By the time I arrived and started reporting in 1989, the government was cracking down on budding political opposition to the autocratic President Daniel arap Moi. The president had announced there would be multiparty elections but he and his government would not tolerate any criticism.

But dissent to Moi's repressive regime was rising in the poorer sections of Nairobi, especially in Kibera, the same neighborhood as Mother Teresa's mission. I knew it was my duty to hear it. I drove there with my recorder. I could hear shouting and banging nearby but didn't see anything. I was told police and rioters were clashing with opposition rioters using sticks and rocks just over the hill. I started interviewing people about their views on a multiparty democracy that didn't let the opposition make their voices heard. Suddenly a surge of people came over the hill, and surrounded my car. With my tape recorder running, I jumped back inside the car and locked the doors. The crowd was angry and violent.

I listened to the crowd get angrier around my car. And then I heard the first thud. Someone hit the car with a rock. It was time to leave. Carefully, but quickly, I drove through the crowd navigating around the people as the car was hit, pelted, and then slammed with rocks and sticks. The car was battered but I was unharmed and I had captured it all on my recorder.

What I learned is that audio requires you to be close to the action. When you are listening to audio, you are in the scene like the reporter, and that makes audio storytelling powerful. And its power can be used in your classroom.

Audio also allowed me to get very up close with gorillas. With my base in Nairobi, I covered all of East Africa reporting on events in Tanzania, Somalia, and Sudan. One of my goals was to see gorillas up close in the wild and tell their story with sound. Fueled by stories and images of Jane Goodall and her study of chimpanzees in the wild, I set off to document the sound of gorillas in what was then called Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I recorded our two-day trek as our guide used audio and physical clues to find the gorillas. He would see tree branches trampled in a certain way and shush our group so he could hear something inaudible to the rest of us. Silence on the hike was required. It was imperative that, when we discovered the family of silverback gorillas, we did not surprise them. The gorillas have a home area of about 12 square miles. They could have been anywhere as they roamed about looking for food.

With one gesture of his hand, our guide told us to stop and not move. Less than 20 feet away was a family of gorillas. I raised my mic to them, but we were too far away to capture anything more than general bird and forest sounds. So I crept closer. What struck me is how quiet the gorillas were. Aside from the occasional snort that sounded more like a pig or a horse, they silently munched on branches. I thought I would be capturing the sound of the gorillas in the natural habitat. When that sound was not distinctive, I learned an important lesson about audio journalism.