My Trip To America

I interviewed my 84 year old grandma about her educational experiences in America, as well as Africa. I call my grandma “Shosho” because that is the Swahili word for grandmother. My Shosho went to a one room school house in grades 1-8. The typical class size was 45-50 students with one teacher. Her one room school house was just one big room with three windows on each wall, a door, and a blackboard at the front of the class. The floors were wooden and not sanded so it was easy to get splinters. She said it looked like what a modern day workshop would. But she said the one room school house has “no comparison to schools today.” They had one textbook, a writing tablet, and played hide-and-seek, dodgeball, and drop the handkerchief.

The girls always wore dresses, and the guys typically wore overalls. During the summer they wore no shoes. The dress code we have in place in schools today is there because there is such a variety of what people wear. For secondary school, Shosho was bused to a county school where there were very few kids, only 13 in her grade. It was during the wartime so there were little to no boys in school with her. They would go to the gym for PE and play basketball. For lunch, because she was from a poor family, they took biscuits and scrambled egg sandwiches. She never had a cafeteria system during her schooling. She was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. They did not have religion as a core subject, but a volunteer missionary came once a week and taught Bible stories. There were not many rules during her time in school, but there were a few basics. They could not talk, and especially not talk back to the teacher. They would be punished by spanking or whipping. If they did not do their homework, although they rarely had any, that was punishable by spanking. If they threw spit balls at other people, they were punished by having to stand in the corner on their