The Art of Listening
Eighth-Graders Draw Inspiration from Humans of New York to Tell Elders’ Stories
By Ben Michelman, Eighth-Grade Language Arts Teacher and Middle School Community Engagement Coordinator, and Ginny Robinson, Eighth-Grade Language Arts Teacher and Middle School Academic Dean
In language arts, we strive to demonstrate the power of stories. One of the cornerstones of eighth-grade language arts is our poetry slam in the spring. Though many students start the drafting process by claiming that “nothing interesting has ever happened to them,” we watch exemplars, write toward diverse prompts, and make multiple drafts so students understand that they — and every individual — have unique and important stories to share. We also read Maus II, a graphic memoir that centers on Art Spiegelman, the author, interviewing his father about surviving Auschwitz. As much as the book focuses on Art’s father’s heart-wrenching stories, it also spends a lot of time examining the interviews themselves — how these intimate, difficult conversations impact the father-son relationship.
Upon finishing our examination of Maus II, we wanted to explore the power of conversation further, so we turned to Humans of New York — comprising a blog and popular social media accounts full of portraits and interviews conducted by Brandon Stanton with strangers, mostly on the streets of New York City. We learned how to interview: how people often respond to initial questions in generalities and clichés, and how we must be careful listeners and ask pointed follow-up questions. We learned about the importance of surprise, emotions and details in our quest to draw compelling stories from our interview subjects and truly get to know them. We practiced interviewing each other and learned some unexpected things from people with whom we’ve been sharing space for months — and in most cases, years.
Then, students were given a choice: They could interview an elder in their life or someone at a local retirement community. The class was pretty much split down the middle. We drove students to the Emerald Pond, Durham Regent and Carolina Reserve retirement communities. Students sat with their interviewees for 30 to 60 minutes; we had to pull some away in order to get back to class on time. The bus rides home were buzzing. One student complained, “My person only wanted to talk about his divorce and oysters.” His teacher responded, “Outstanding!” Next, students transcribed their interviews and decided where the most compelling story lay. They punctuated the chosen excerpt of the interview — an exercise that demonstrated the impact of punctuation on tone and meaning. Students, more than ever before, learned to use ellipses, dashes and colons to show skipped words, hesitation, interruptions in thought and connections of ideas. They ended by pairing a portrait of their interviewee with the punctuated excerpt, in the style of Humans of New York.
A few months later, as students started to draft their slam poems, fewer claimed that they had “nothing interesting to say!”
“I forgot to tell ya that I saw this whole country as a hitchhiker! From Pittsburgh we went all the way to California, all the way to Florida. The only states I didn't see [were] the Northeast like Maine and Massachusetts. We didn't want to go up that way because it's always cold all the time! But, I saw every other state hitchhiking, riding freight trains; we went to jail a couple times. But, no matter what state we were in, the judge said the same thing, ‘You’re going to jail!’ It didn’t matter. We were kids. We were happy. We were free. And we had a good time.”
— Bo, Durham Regent (Interviewed by Ben Magid ’28)
Throughout your life, what is the toughest situation that you have faced?
“Toughest situation that I've faced was when the revolution happened in my old country; they put me in prison. So that was the toughest situation I have ever had. I never experienced anything like that before or after. So that was 24 hours. Those 24 hours made me feel like I'm in hell! I will never forget that, going to prison. You [don’t] know what's going to happen to you. That was the toughest situation I have ever had.”
During that, how did you find a way to comfort yourself, to make yourself understand that it's going to be okay and you're going to get out of that situation?
“When I was in prison, I wasn't alone in the cell. We had probably several people. I don't remember how many people we were, but I think we were maybe five, six, seven. Anyway, I asked my prison cellmate, rather, to tell a story about our life and why we got here because I felt like the clock stopped at that time. The clock was not moving, basically — I mean, emotionally, not physically. We wanted to make ourselves occupied, so I said, ‘Why don't we [tell] our story about why we got here?’ Then we became a little more, I mean, relaxed, and we went to other stories like ‘are you married,’ ‘do you have kids,’ stuff like that. So we kind of got lost in the stories, and suddenly, like, three hours had passed or four hours or ten hours passed. And that made me calmer and understand that I was okay, and I was going to get through this, you know.”
— Mark (Kyle’s grandfather), San Francisco, California (Interviewed by Kyle Capone ’28)
“So she’s saying that her biggest accomplishment is that she managed all the five kids and entire household alone. Like, she used to, like, educate all the five kids and cook them food and manage everything while [grandpa] used to be in office.”
And what do you think is one problem with society today?
“So, the problem with society is that everybody is on their phone, and they don’t interact with one another. She doesn’t like it because, like, she feels lonely — that we are all busy with our lives and we are busy with phones and laptops and stuff, and she feels a lot more lonely than she used to.”
— Mamiji (Yash’s grandmother), New Delhi, India (Interviewed by Yash Mehta ’28, translated by Prachi Mehta, Yash’s cousin)
What is your biggest fear?
“My biggest fear was when I lost so many people in my family. I just lost my oldest sister and her son … I had just talked to her th[e] morning … she got sick … and went into the hospital with a ventilator and everything. It was hard for me to take the fact that I had just talked to her. But you get over it; you have to. Because I remember the good times. I gave it to the Lord. I said, you know, ‘I need your strength. I need you to guide me each day and get me through this.’ It was hard the first three or four days, yeah.”
What was your relationship with your sister like?
“We laughed a lot, talked about our feelings. Even that morning we did — we talked about what we wanted at this point in our life. And um, but I don't know, she's the one that did not call me early like she [usually] did that morning. But anyway, I miss her. But we’ll see each other again, yeah we will.”
What were you guys talking about on the phone call?
“I asked her, ‘Alice, are you feeling okay?’ And she said, ‘Well I'm just piddling around’ … We just sort of talked about not anything particular. What we do during the day, if we are having a good day, and what we're gonna do tomorrow. And of course she got to where she wasn’t cooking anymore, like I don't cook here anymore, and I miss it … but it was just like sister-to-sister conversations.”
— Glennie, Durham (Interviewed by Yari Brock ’28)
Have there ever been any moments when a person's kindness has impacted you?
“Yeah, when I went to Connecticut in my last year of residency in medicine, I had to find a place to live. So I went to this ice cream store in the little town of Prospect, which is right outside of Waterbury and New Haven. I asked the owners, ‘Do you know of anybody who has a garage apartment, or an apartment in their house?’ You know, I wanted to have a place to live, but I didn't want to buy furniture. Also, when you're on call at the hospital half the time, you're rarely ever home. And so they said, ‘Well, there's this couple that lives down the road.’ The Sands were their name, and they were in their 70s. And so I go down, and their house is magnificent. And so this was a — it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and in June, and they just finished lunch. He said, ‘Would you like some lunch?’ ‘Well, I just had some lunch.’ They said, ‘Well, do you like blueberry pie?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ They said, ’Well, would you like any blueberry pie?’ I said, ‘Well, if you have some,’ and they said, ‘Then would you like it with ice cream?’ ‘Yes.’ At any rate, they — these people basically took me under their wing and became my best friends. It was almost like having your parents there or your grandparents, and I said ‘Well, do you have a place where I can live?’ And they took me down the hall, and they showed me this room in the wing of the house, that I could have and live in. I asked, ‘What — what would you charge for me to live with you?’ They said, ‘Well, the only thing you have to do to pay us is to feed our dog when we’re not here.’ I said, ‘This is too much!’ And so I said, ‘These people are so nice. Once I live here, they’ll figure out what a rascal I am, and they'll throw me out! Let me just start paying rent!’ So, at any rate, I later found a place to live in Walcott, which is another small town outside of Waterbury. I lived there for several months, and the Sands had me down frequently for Sunday dinners. And we became dear friends, and they became patients of mine. It was sad to see because they were pretty elderly and ultimately died. But they were, they were marvelous people. And that was an experience.”
— Darrell Daniels, Vero Beach, Florida (Interviewed by Caroline Hunter ’28)
“I left this country, you know, to go to Korea. When I was in the military, I was in the Army and I spent 14 months over in Korea. You know, I can just remember flying into Korea as the plane was coming down. You could see everything on the ground. You saw this entirely different kind of architecture, you know, than anything that you have seen in this country. And then you got to know people from another culture. And you realize, you know, they're not really strangers, you know. They're just people. Human beings, just like you are, have the same wishes and desires — for their life, for their family, and for their, if they're married, for their children — that you have. It gives you a better outlook on the way you, you know, handle your own life and how you handle people and how you deal with people.”
— Jack Kramer, Charlotte (Interviewed by Henry Roberts ’28)
What's a goal that you feel like you have reached?
“Well, I guess 80," says George Bottesch, retired stone mason and builder and a grandfather of 3.
Great, and what is something you regret that has happened along the way?
“What I regret, hmm… Well, I regret the events that took place, yeah, on October 7th back in '73; the fire, Eric's death. That's a major regret for sure.”
(He is referring to his son.) Is there anything more to say about that?
“Oh… well, uh yeah there's quite a bit more about that… depends on how much time you have!”
There's no time limit.
“No time limit, oh my.”
What would you have done differently?
“What would I have done differently… oh, we could have done a million things differently, but we didn't. We did what we did, and I mean the timing of any decision would have made a difference, so many things, so what can I say?”
What did you do to get through this?
“Well, I guess time is a great healer.”
— George Bottesch, Anson, Maine (Interviewed by Emery Taylor ’28)
“I’ve always loved teaching, some would even say I have a gift. it's been something I've always been so passionate about.”
When did this passion really start for you?
“The biggest thing had to be teaching students during my undergraduate years. After serving years in the military, I went to UCLA, and I was an assistant teacher to a group of ninth-graders. There were about 10 students in the class that I was assigned to teach. I was supposed to be teaching them biology, but everyone thought these students were so far gone that the primary teacher gave me a fourth-grade How and Why? book and told me: ‘Teach them anything. Just get them to learn something.’ And these students were miserable. They had no interest in learning, and no hopes for their future. So, I didn’t even open the book for the first couple weeks. We just talked. And slowly, these students began to open up, and they learned. Now, by no means did they get to a ninth-grade biology level, but they had learned, and finally had hope of a future.”
Was there anyone who influenced you to pursue teaching?
“Well, nobody in particular, but I always wished to make an impact on someone like my teachers made an impact on me. Growing up without parents was difficult, but my teachers made such a difference. They took the role of my parents, in a way. … My father was killed when I was around 12, and my mother died when I was 3; during Father’s Day or Mother’s Day, that was always the hardest. I would cry. My teachers made it all somehow feel OK. If I could impact even just one of my students the way my teachers impacted me, I would be proud. ... I continued teaching philosophy and ethics for 46 years, and those years I spent teaching have to be the best of my life.
“When I look back and I see how far I’ve come, and how many lives I’ve changed, I just think to myself: ‘Wow.’”