The day in the life of an MYP

Handing out surveys is easier said than done. Only once you have taken a hundred surveys and hit the streets of Telford do you realise that, actually, nobody wants to fill out surveys. No matter how important, how fancy and how significant you tell people these surveys are, they still refuse to do them.

Occasionally, a teen’s will power will crumple under our persuasiveness, and they will fill out a survey with as little effort as possible, desperately glancing up every other second looking for an opportunity to escape.

Just as we were giving up hope, accepting the fact that half the people of Telford refuse to care about its future, Park Live came along. A day in Telford Town Park of live music from amateur bands, it was the perfect chance to corner young people and bombard them with surveys.

It seemed here, when there were no shops calling their name, people were willing to spend a few minutes of their precious time reading the questions and sincerely ticking the correct boxes. One set of youth, however, were adamant that in return for answering our questions, I owed them all lollypops. Despite being robbed of my sweets, my voice and my UKYP pens, we continued throughout the day and managed to recover 250 completed surveys from the youth – an impressive result.

Combined with the schools we contacted and the few teens without enough will power to say no, we actually had quite a remarkable pile of surveys.  Then came the tallying. One by one, each survey was to be read and the answers tallied. Needless to say, it took a while.

It would have been a lot worse had some of the survey answers not been so amusing. My favourite were the teenagers who thought it was be hilarious to say the most common mode of transport they use are Trams. Especially when these teens gave us their Telford post codes. Considering Telford doesn’t own a Tram system, these youth clearly cannot read or know of a transport system the rest of the Telford population do not. Other people drew their own boxes. I don’t know what ran through their minds when they thought that would be useful to anyone , and that goes to the people who answered the question ‘how much do you think a single bus fare should be?’ with ‘dunno’ and ‘dunno mum pays’ as well. Some people wrote ‘what’s this?’ beside the term ‘Week Rider’. I was stood beside them whilst they were filling it out. WHY DID THEY NOT JUST ASK ME?

Ignoring the surveys that made no sense, I spent a good few hours tallying the results, reading each question over and over again until they all blurred into one and I could no longer distinguish between tally lines, letters, numbers, boxes and ticks. To be fair, the million tally lines that littered each page gave one quite a sense of pride at their achievement. I was genuinely surprised at the number of surveys we managed to get filled out – even if they did leave me questioning both my sanity and where on earth the Telford tram system is.