Clayton Arble is a member of the Hampshire College Class of 2024. They graduated from the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter High School (PFSJ) in 2019. They entered Hampshire College with a focus on literature and have had poems published in small presses. They live in Belchertown, Massachusetts.
Floyd Cammock is a 10th- and 11th-grade history teacher at the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter High School (PFSJ), in Chicopee, MA. He is a member of the Syracuse University Class of 1999. He lives in Chicopee, Massachusetts.
Reflection: I had a lot of fun doing my interview, and judging from my interviewee’s enthusiasm, I think he did too. There were some hiccups getting to it. Because I have a Chromebook, I had to ask Hampshire IT to switch the settings on my school Zoom account to allow me to record calls.
Doing my interview went smoother than I expected. Of course, there was still some awkwardness on my part. I’d never done a formal interview before, so I made some rookie mistakes, and I noticed them in real-time: speaking over my interviewee, leaving my desk fan on, forgetting to switch to the gallery view. But my interviewee, being a teacher, spoke thoroughly and eloquently and treated my questions with a seriousness that makes our interview a valuable recording, mistakes aside. The only thing I noticed on Floyd’s end was his tendency to go slightly off-topic from the question at hand, but we never strayed from the theme of teaching during the pandemic, so I never had to steer him back to the question. Thankfully, there weren’t any technical difficulties–I half expected one of our Zooms to glitch out in the middle of the call, or (God forbid) the recording to fail to upload to my account. (I triple checked to make sure I was recording in the first place.)
If I were to interview Floyd again, I would either memorize or print out my questions so the conversation would run smoother. It felt obtrusive to the flow of the interview switching tabs every time Floyd concluded his response to a question. I almost wish I could do it again and call this interview the practice run, but I know the rawness of Floyd’s responses would be lost if he were to give them again, even a couple of days or weeks from now.