Media Habits

This is another blog about my reporter teacher. Disclaimer: All opinions expressed about this teacher are solely my own.

I’m writing this from memory. Most of my papers from that class have been “destroyed”. I had a fun time doing that after I found some papers from that class after I moved.

One of the first assignments she gave was a media charting project. You had to record everything you did by the minute and by the day and categorize it by media type. For example you watched 4 hours of tv on Tuesday. You also had to say what you watched, if it was on cable, PBS, or Pay per view and I also think you had to name the channel/network. There were 7 media types: television, radio, recorded music, (CDs, tapes, records, and reel to reel this is back in 2004 and I think she didn‘t really take MP3s into consideration) books, newspapers, magazines, and being online.

You also had to take inventory of stuff you had. You had to list all the magazines and newspapers your household subscribed to. You also had to say how many audio recordings you had in your household. I felt that was not representative of me because my dad has a large album collection. I think I own less than 10 vinyl albums. Back then I owned the most CDs in the house though.

When I worked on this assignment I had just gotten the No Doubt CD “Everything in Time”, so I was listening to that CD a lot. I had also gotten a few CDS for my birthday that were in high rotation including an (English) Beat one. The bulk of my CD listening time was devoted to No Doubt CDs.

Even though I do not have the paper I could pretty much summarize what I did back in February of 2004. I mostly listened to the CD “Everything in Time”. I would listen to KROQ a lot especially in the morning on the ride to school I would listen to Kevin and Bean. I did watch some shows on PBS, but they were mostly kids’ shows like Arthur and Zoom. It’s not like I was trying to look like an intellectual or anything. The only book reading I did was for my classes. The only newspaper reading I did was read the Sunday comics for like 10 minutes. I spent most of my time online on neopets.

My dad told me to lie on the assignment because he said I shouldn’t write that I watch such childish shows like shows on PBS Kids and Saturday Morning cartoons. Here are some of the shows I think I watched back then. Most of these listed I’m going from memory. Kirby, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sonic X, Arthur, Zoom, Berestain Bears, Mucha Lucha, Xaiolin Showdown, MegaMan NT Warrior, Cubix, Shaman King, and Fillmore. You know that’s why I hated telling him what my assignments were because most of the time he would try and take over, or badly misinterpret them. His misinterpretation was that I charted my media habits, and then read them aloud to the class. I never mentioned anything about reading the results aloud. I have no idea where he even got that from. I even wrote on my assignment that he said that. I think the teacher’s comment was something like “I hope you were truthful on this part”.

The funny thing was that when I finally got the paper back from her at the end of the semester. There were all these funny comments written on it. She wanted to know why I thought people would think I’m dumb because of my reading habits. She also wanted to know if I was interested in a job in advertising. She also wanted me to do a project about when my family was a Neilson family for a week.