In my opinion, a hero becomes a hero by serving as a role model or inspiration to another person- whether benefiting you was their direct intention or not.
For the Hero In My Eyes project, we had to create a character sketch about a person who we saw as a hero. It needed to be, however, someone who you had easy access to. For example, you couldn't choose to base your project on a celebrity, politician, or someone who has passed away. The character sketch was a deep description of your hero, and within the description needed to be the reason they were your hero. You needed to give lots of detail about the moment they became your hero, and why.
We started with brainstorming what being a hero meant to us. Once we were able to create all of our own definitions, we had to choose a hero of our own. I chose Christopher Stephens, my former summer camp counselor (to learn more about him, click HERE). Before I could start writing my character sketch, I had to interview Chris. I asked him a ton of questions pertaining to his opening and running his summer camp, and with his responses, I was able to create a writing piece describing him with even more precision because I could use his actual dialogue from the interview in the character sketch. Also, after the interview I took a few pictures of him to use for the project. I needed one displaying his heroism and another just showing his personality.
I learned a lot about how before I can write an in depth writing piece about something or someone, it is really important to be knowledgeable when it comes to their past and background. I learned this mostly in the process of interviewing Chris. I found that there were a lot of things I didn't know about him in terms of his motivation to work with kids and open his own summer camp. Though those things may seem paltry, they are actually very important to creating an image of him and his personality in the reader's mind. The main challenge I faced during this project was that I was having a really difficult time tying his interview dialogue into the writing piece where I had to describe him, as well as his heroic moment. If I could go back and change one aspect of the way I did this project, I think I would spend more time defining what I hero really was to me. Chris would absolutely still be my hero, but at the beginning of the project, I had a really tough time coming up with who my hero really was. I think if I would have gone deeper into what a hero really was to me, I would have been able to decide much faster than I did. This would have helped because I could have started getting together the rest of my project much farther in advance than I did- I took a pretty long time choosing my hero when I could have been working on other parts of the project.
To me, perspective was a huge part of the Hero In My Eyes project. This is because every person has a different version or definition of what a hero is to them. In class, we spent a lot of time discussing the different ways a person might think of a person as a hero. It was important to understand and accept that each person has their own view, and you might disagree with someone else's view, but you need to step back and agree to disagree. Chances are you would not be able to convince them out of their opinion, because they are attached to their opinion just as much as you are to yours. It was also very interesting for me to see other peoples' perspectives because even though their viewpoints didn't change mine, I was able to have a much deeper understanding as to why they saw a person as a hero. Their reasonings made a lot more sense when they described their hero in their character sketches because it really took you deep into the impact that person had on them.
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