Interviews and Unschooling

Image by popturfdotcom here

Yesterday, Mum and I made a movie together. We settled down in the living room and set up out tripod, a dining room chair with a pile of out-of-date encyclopedias sitting on. I sat in one of the big armchairs. Mum set up the camera on the 'tripod'. Today Mum would be interviewing me about being unschooled and about studying at university.

I glanced at the list of questions I had sitting in my lap. We discussed what I was going to say. Was this a good idea? It felt a lot like public speaking, which scares me. I'd much rather sing to a crowd than speak to them. Taking a deep breath, I waited for Mum to start filming. The little red light appeared on the camera. I smiled at my non-existent audience and began to speak.

Once I got going, it wasn't too scary after all. Every so often we stopped the camera, discussed what I was going to say in the next segment. Mum took a rest from holding onto the camera.And then we carried on. I talked for what seemed to be ages before we finally got through all the questions and finished filming.

Then Mum took the video to her room, downloaded it onto her computer and started editing it into something acceptable for other people to see. As I passed her room occasionally, I caught snatches of my own voice, babbling on about one thing or another, and winced. There is nothing so humbling as hearing your own voice. It didn't take long for Mum to have the movie finished though.

"Do you want to see it?" Mum asked me.

I shook my head at once. "No thanks. I don't like listening to myself talk."

But even though I didn't watch it, other family members told me that it was good. It seemed that me sitting in front of a camera and attempting to talk about my experiences unschooling and now studying at university had ended up with a fairly good video. Already we're thinking about the next movie. Now that I've been interviewed once, I wouldn't mind too much doing it again. My brothers and sisters might have a turn too. Who knows what we might come up with next?

If you're interested in hearing what it was like to be unschooled, and what it's like to study university over the internet, then please check out my interview. You can find it here: Imogen Talks about Unschooling and University