Blog 3

Now and Then

Stories teach us, change us, and maybe even reveal to us what we want to become. For my field work I decided to not make a questionnaire because I knew it would be too long. I choose a few people and asked them about the stories, movies, and TV shows they liked as children and how they think it influenced them.

            I talked to Beth, a film student about her favorite films as a child. “I watched a lot of old movies when I was a kid. My favorite was Gone with the Wind.”- Beth. Beth wants to be a Production Designer (basically they oversee all the design aspects, such as costumes, lighting, and scenery, of a film making sure they all “work together”) and loved the old style and design of these films and aims to bring them back into movies she helps create. I asked her about books she liked, “My mom use to read me Little Bear and Winnie the Pooh.” Beth loved bears and still does. From these books she saw the lessons these books were trying to teach her about friendship and family. I asked her about TV shows she watched, “I didn’t really like TV shows so much. Sometimes I watched Rugrats.”

            I also spoke to Austen, an oceanography student who is very enthusiastic about building things. As a child he read a lot. “I got really bored with picture books pretty fast.” His parents started reading chapter books to him when he was four. He was read Magic Tree House, Hardy Boys, and King Arthur. Austen reached a very high reading level very quickly and by fourth grade enjoyed reading Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter. He watched TV shows like Doug, Hey Arnold, and Magic School Bus. His favorite movies were the original Star Wars movies, Indiana Jones, and the Sixth Sense. Austen has always had an enthusiastic interest in science fiction and it influenced his want to understand and discover the world around him.

            Nika, a theater student says she had been “very influenced by stories.” When she was little her favorite movie was “Gay Purr-ee” an animated film from the 1960s that featured singing cats in France with Judy Garland as one of the voices. “The movie was beautifully animated and the music was lovely. I remember that it scared me a little but I still loved it.” She watched TV shows like Pokemon, Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball-Z. “I watched whatever my older brother wanted to watch because he was the biggest and there for, got the remote.” As a child she read lots of old stories that her mother had saved from her own childhood, like Raggedy Ann. “My mother read me ‘Alice in Wonderland’ from this copy of the book that had belonged to her grandmother.” Nika always wanted to be the person in the story. “I spent hours in my back yard pretending I was Alice.” It was what influenced her to try out for her first play “Alice in Wonderland” when she was in third grade. “Since then I have never looked back.”

            The stories these people watched or read as a child has influenced who they have become. I look at small children in the preschool I work at, I see the books they read and I wonder what it will mean to them.