Cribs--Jerry Style

Sooo, some well-meaning, I'm sure, Chinese English teacher assigned his or her students the project of interviewing a foreigner.  The interview must be videoed (is that a word?), and be 7-8 minutes long.  They could work in groups of two or three.  This much I've gathered, because I've been bombarded by requests from students in my mythology class to do interviews.  I've lined up three groups so far, and done two of the interviews (next one tomorrow night); hopefully I'll avoid any more.  Oh well, it's at least a way to spend a bit more time with my students.

I did the first interview last week; it was a bit awkward as they hadn't really prepared anything and were trying to figure out what to talk about.  They even asked me at one point, "So, what do you want to talk about?"  I don't know, it's your interview.  However, they did invited me to go eat with them afterwards, and they showed my another hot pot restaurant on campus, so that was definitely worth it.

The second interview was Monday night.  This was was with my student Jerry.  Jerry is easily my nuttiest student.  He seems as if he's going to explode with excitement at any minute, whether the cause of the outburst is my Christmas tree or the exploits of Odysseus.  At least I never have to worry in my mythology class that no one will have an opinion or comment to contribute--on the contrary, I have to find ways to cut him off once he gets on a roll.  He is always the last to leave, and usually walks all the way down the stairs to the door with him, still asking questions.  I don't know that I've heard many people who can talk faster than Jerry, especially not switching back and forth between Chinese and English is the same sentence without stopping for breath. Not that I'm complaining--it's great to have an enthusiastic student.  All of this is just to warn you that he's not entirely mentally stable...

However, he is creative.  He decided that sitting on the couch talking (as my other students have done) was boring.  So, he came up with the idea of doing the interview like an episode of "Cribs", you know, the one where they visit the homes of celebrities and are given a tour.  And he does nothing halfway--he even started out in the stairwell with an intro, and then I had to open the door (all rehearsed), and then show him around.  Fortunately, the girl who was with him doing the video was also quite good.  She was panning in and out and making it look quite professional.  Altogether, we got nearly twenty minutes of footage; I don't know how exactly he plans to edit it for his assignment.  The interview part at the end (which involved moving furniture around to make a Barbara Walters-esque set, with the Christmas tree in the middle, and the whole "please welcome our next guest..." dialogue) was fairly boring, and is a really long section of tape I don't feel like editing at the moment,  but the "Cribs" part I'll share.

Flickr wouldn't load the whole thing, so I had to split it into three parts:
Jerry hosting Cribs 1
Jerry hosting Cribs 2
Jerry hosting Cribs 3

So, there's a guided tour of my apartment, or at least the parts I would let Jerry in. :)