Jan 15th Audio Stories

1. "What's your life like now, Dad"
http://storycorps.org/listen/stories/ken-morganstern-priya-morganstern-and-bhavani-jaroff/

This audio story first interested me when I saw that it was about a man with Alzheimer's disease. I was shocked that someone would choose to conduct an interview with someone who has very little memory to tell stories. When I first started listening to this audio story, I thought they would probably be asking the father about his Alzheimer's disease. However, never once in the interview did they mention it. Instead, the by asking the question's they asked, as a listener I was able to infer that he has Alzheimer's disease. 


They did this by asking the dad to name all of his children, and he forgot his son. Although he did say, "there is a man in there, somewhere". They also asked him about his day to day life and he gave very vague answers which inferred that he couldn't remember. 


The interviewers did a very nice job at making sure their father felt comfortable by laughing when he forgot something rather then feeling sad for him. I could tell that this helped the father feel more comfortable because he could see that they took it somewhat lightly. Sometimes during the interview however, I think they took it too lightly by laughing too much which seemed inappropriate.




2. "If just one of them gets through, they may save us all"
http://storycorps.org/listen/stories/john-hunter-and-julianne-swope/


Part of the reason why I chose this story was simply because of the picture. It had an older black male with a younger red-headed girl. I thought since this man most likely wasn't the girls biological father, what would they be doing together? The beggining of the audio story is a little girl (red-head) talking to the teacher (the older black male) about a game called "The world peace game". This is a game that the teacher invented in order to show his students that every desicion they make could impact the world and to show them catastrophe so that they will hope to fix it in the future. 


Later in the interview, the voice of an older girl who had the teacher 15 years ago came on. This girl was in college studying to work for international peace. She tells her old teacher that his game inspired her life and what she was doing. As they discuss the game you can hear the girls passion, but also the teachers happiness. He said that "If just one of them gets through, they may save us all". In other words, if just one of the students that he taught was able to make a change in the world for the better, they may just save us all. I thought it was very nice for this old man to see that his hard work payed off even 15 years later. You could hear his appreciation for the girl who took on this challenge in his voice. It was a very touching story.