What was your school like, and how did you get there each morning?

Why this question works

School stories are friendly ground. They are easy to begin, often funny and full of detail, which makes this a good question for a first conversation. Everyone can describe a building, a walk and a lunch pail, and before long they are describing a teacher, a best friend and the day the stovepipe fell down.

Asking how they got there each morning is a small trick that pays off. A journey has a beginning, a middle and an end, so it gives the memory a shape. You hear about the road, the weather, the neighbor's dog, the older brother who was supposed to wait and never did. For grandchildren, the contrast with their own school day is a delight, and it starts real conversations between the generations about what has changed and what never does.

How to ask it

Ask it when a grandchild has just come home from school, or around the start of a new school year, when the subject is already in the air. If there is a class photograph in an album, find it first. Your grandparent will start naming faces along the rows, and each name carries a story.

Keep your tone easy and a little amazed, because you probably will be. Ask for numbers and sizes: how many children, how many rooms, how far, how early. Concrete questions get concrete answers. Let your grandparent enjoy the comparison with schools today without turning it into a debate about which was better.

Other ways to word it

• What did your school look like, inside and out?
• How did you get to school, and how long did it take?
• How many kids were in your class?
• What did a normal school day look like from the first bell to the last?

Follow-up ideas

• What did you carry with you, and what was in your lunch?
• What did you wear to school?
• What happened at recess?
• What were the rules, and what happened if you broke one?
• Which subject did you love, and which did you dread?
• Who sat next to you?
• What did you do the minute school let out?

An example answer

This is an invented example, written to show the kind of detail to listen for. Your grandpa’s answer will be his own.

"It was a brick schoolhouse with two rooms, the little room and the big room, and you moved to the big room in fifth grade. That was a proud day. We walked, a mile and a quarter along the gravel road, and my older sister was in charge of all of us. In winter my mother put a baked potato in each coat pocket to keep our hands warm, and then we ate it at lunch."

"There were maybe thirty children in the whole school. The stove was in the middle of the room, so in January you were either roasting or freezing depending on your desk. I sat by the window, which was the cold side, but I could watch the road. I learned my times tables looking at that road."

What to write down

Write down the name of the school and the town, how many rooms and how many children it had, and the route your grandparent took to get there. Add the details that surprised you: what was in the lunch pail, how the room was heated, what the rules were. Record the names of teachers and classmates as they come up. If a class photograph exists, list the names along each row.

The Tell Me Your Story journals for grandparents give school days a chapter of their own, and a question like this one starts it. Each question has a full page for a handwritten answer, so the two-room schoolhouse and the walk to it are kept in your grandparent's own words.

See the Tell Me Your Story, Grandpa journal or the Tell Me Your Story, Grandma journal. For more ideas, read questions to ask your grandparents or browse school days questions.