When Sophie Ben-Ami was in seventh grade, she was so shy that she hardly spoke in class. Today, at fourteen, her voice is heard every two weeks by hundreds of students at her junior high school in southern Texas. Sophie is the creator of “Break Time,” the school's first podcast.
The idea came from a long bus ride. “I always listened to podcasts on my way to school,” she explains. “One day I thought: our school is full of interesting people, but nobody hears their stories.” She asked her English teacher for help, and the teacher found an old microphone in a storage room.
The first episode was not a success. Sophie interviewed the school's cleaner, Mr. Haddad, who has worked at the school for twenty years. But she recorded it in the noisy hallway, and it was difficult to hear anything. “I wanted to give up,” she admits. Instead, she watched online videos about sound editing and recorded the next interview in the quiet library.
Since then, “Break Time” has featured the librarian, a former student who became a doctor, and the school's oldest teacher, who talked about the school forty years ago. Each episode is about fifteen minutes long, short enough to hear during a break. Five other students now work with Sophie. One writes questions, two edit the sound, and two choose music.
Sophie says the podcast changed her more than anyone else. “When you hold a microphone, you have to ask questions and listen carefully. Slowly, I stopped being afraid of my own voice.” Her advice to other teenagers is simple: “Start with what you have. My first microphone was older than me.”