Have you ever wondered what it was like for your grandparents or even your parents when they were in school? Did they get treated differently then we do now? Here are some questions that my Grandmother answered for me! I even got the answers to the question!
1) How big was your school?
2) How fare away was it from your house?
3) What was your teacher like?
4) What were the rules?
5) Did you ever disobey the rules?
6) Was the school ever delayed or canceled?
7) What were the rules about being late or not showing up?
8) How were the students disciplined?
9) Did you have to walk to and from school?
10) What subjects did you learn?
11) Did the boys learn different things then the girls?
12) Were the younger children treated differently?
13) Were the teacher’s only men or only women?
14) Did you ever have projects that you worked on or was all of it rewriting word after word and things like that?
15) Did you have dress codes?
16) How many kids were in a class?
17) How many kids were in a class?
18) Did you eat lunch at school?
19) Were the classrooms crowded?
20) Did you have a lot of textbooks?
21) What textbooks did you have?
22) Did you ever have classes outside?
23) Did the school have dances?
24) What sports were played during gym?
25) What kinds of sport teams were there?
26) Did you have any kind of special except gym?
27) How many schools were there?
28) Do you remember anything with wars going on like World War 2 or the Depression?
Dress Codes:
Rules like no running or no talking back to the teachers were not around when my Grandmother was in school, which was 1939 to 1951. The children rarely ever disobeyed the rules. One of the most interesting rules that were not around when my Grandmother was in school was a dress code. The children in 6th grade were still children not young adults like today. The girls wore dresses and jeans for gym and the boys wear pants for everything. Shirts were long sleeves or t-shirts down to the elbow. Today 6th graders wear what they like. All most every day girls wear pants not dresses. Only on special occasions do you see girls wearing skirts or dresses. “I don’t like to wear dresses in school because they are too formal. A sundress may be nice for a ceremony at school but other than that no. I may wear a skirt to school but not everyday”, says Lauren (a girl in my class).
Classes:
In school today there is a classroom for every grade or a few for every grade. When my grandmother was in school she had two grades in one classroom. She said that approximately 50 children were in the classroom at once. They all know each other because they all lived in the same neighborhood. There was one elementary school for every neighborhood. The classrooms weren’t that small, each child got their own desk. When it came to learning they did not miss out because of the class size. They still got as much attention as they needed and learned what they needed to learn. The topics they learned were: History, Geography, Math, English, and Penmanship. Most of those topics are still learned today, the unfamiliar topic was penmanship. Penmanship is where you learn to write with pens. Not the ballpoint pens but the pens were you have to dip them in an ink well. My grandmother said that they had a hole in the corner of the desks were they would fill it with ink. “It was hard to start but the better you got at it the faster you became,” said my Grandmother. She said that she would still be able to write with that kind of pen. When they went to their other classes they would do the same kinds of things as 6th graders today would. They would have to bring their textbooks, #2 pencil, and a notebook. At the end of the year they would have to erase all the marks they made in the textbooks to make them look brain new.
Wars:
World War 11: My Grandmother was in school during World War II and the depression. That did not turn her life around like the War on Terrorism is doing to some kids now. She told me about a project her 5th or 6th grade teacher had them do. Every Sunday in the newspaper there would be a comic section, so they would take that to school and cute comics out and place them in a scrape book. After it was full her teacher sent the comic scrape books to the army in another country so the military could enjoy reading American comics. My Grandmother told me that she felt really good about doing that. Today children in elementary school are doing that every day all around the country of America. Nothing like that has changed!
Depression: The depression did not change my Grandmother’s life either. Every week or so she might have got a few cents to keep to herself but nothing like today. Her family were not to pour but not rich at all. They made do with what they had to spare. She got $.10 per week for milk at school during lunch. The clothing she wore to school was mostly all made by her mother, and her school supplied school spiels and they did not give much. That did not keep her from learning!
Update: 2003/01/25 05:18:47
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