After our journey through Teaching Kids to be Happy, we’ve been able to establish what went well and the challenges along the way.
Setbacks
Our piece may be considered a sensitive topic to discuss. Some people strongly disagreed with the idea of teaching young students how to focus on mental well being and seemed to be unhappy that we were covering this topic. It was simple enough to walk away from some prospective contributors, but definitely not ideal.
One major issue while working was keeping the children of Nettleham Junior School focused on the questions we had. It was a challenge to have them reply to questions. They were easily side tracked and went off on tangents together. Fortunately, we were still able to use the material we had with them. Although it was frustrating at the time, it was still useful. We tried our best to edit out the bits that weren’t ‘on topic’ and polish off the parts that we found to be a good fit to our feature.
Before we even started, we anticipated having trouble with people not getting back to us. Some would reply to emails or phone calls, saying they would be available on this day. When we tried to meet up with them, one wouldn’t show up. Another person we tried to email and meet up with had a death in the family and wasn’t available the last week of the feature. This led to having a piece that is heavily female oriented, although this wasn’t our intention we still think it worked out.
Mark and I also dealt with the amateur problem of replying to our interviewees. Now that we’re done, we realized we should have been nodding and staying quiet to make sure to not interfere with the recording. It was easy to edit this out, but we both learned to take note of our fault and work on this during future recordings.
Skilled Areas
During the early and final week of our project, we felt that each of us did a great job at making sure to contact people (regardless of how many times we had to call or e-mail) to get a hold of them. We also felt that it was good to get off campus, although we did focus the piece in Linconlshire. Mark was able to drive to areas such as Nettleham Junior School and Bishop Grosseteste school to record interviews. This gave us a wider perspective on our topic and helped give us a substantial amount of material.
Working together was also a strong suit for this project. It easily made the jobs we each had less stressful. We were able to evenly assign tasks and power through what needed to be done efficiently by finding what each person worked well with.
Lastly, Nettleham Junior School provided an opportunity for us to become acquainted with headmaster David Gibbons, who’s currently working alongside the University of Lincoln in other radio tasks.