Oral History Project Presentation

Hi, my name is Courtney

Dak and I am going to be giving my oral history project presentation

um to begin.

I put a little quote that education is the most

powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

I feel like that's very relevant to what we've been learning about.

And so I just put that as a little starter to my presentation

here, I have my overview.

So in this presentation,

I will talk to you about different aspects of the school system

um that ranged from 40 to 50 years

ago and how it both has similarities and differences

from the education system

and how it was when I was in high school.

I graduated high school in 2012. So it was just a little bit over 10 years ago.

Uh So there is that 30 to 40 year difference.

I put information about the participants.

So I have the interviewer which is myself, Courtney

Dak.

I am a 29 year old female who graduated high school in 2012.

And then the interviewed party was Ronald Morva.

He is a 60 year old male who graduated high school in 1981.

Um how I came to the conclusions for my similarities and

differences is that I interviewed

Mr Morva

and I used the answers that I received

from his interview

and compared him to my answers that I answered myself.

Um utilizing those same exact questions

here. I put the sample of the interview questions that I asked Mr Mor

Bay.

I also put a little disclaimer that although

these were the base questions that were asked,

I did branch off significantly based on answers that he gave to me.

Um So there are questions that were included in the, in the

interview that are not necessarily on here.

However,

this is the base questions that all those additional questions stemmed off of.

So some similarities that I noticed between

um school, the school system 10 years ago,

as opposed to 40 to 50 years ago,

is that the core curriculum was pretty much the same.

So you had your reading, your writing, your math, science and social studies.

What was learned in those classes necessarily wasn't always the same,

but your core curriculum was

um another thing that was very similar was the electives.

Um

You had your home act, your art, your shop um in both time periods.

So

those electives, I mean, you probably branch out a little bit more nowadays,

but those like core electives

were very, very similar for both of us.

Um Sports and clubs were also very similar.

So you had your

football, your swimming, your debate club,

you had student council and that was seen in both of the time periods.

Um

We may have some more sports now, like, for example,

lacrosse is a little bit more popular than it was.

But overall your base sports are very similar.

Uh clicks,

we noted we referred to the breakfast club and in

the breakfast club there is,

you know, the jocks, the

kind of like burnouts, the s the smart nerds and

we both had those different types of groups in our school system.

Um

And although we had those clicks, everyone was kind of friends with everybody.

And I'm not sure if that's just from, you know, the small town,

both of us have come from small towns. Um So everyone kind of knows everyone in them.

So I'm sure there is that little very difference based on

where if you're living in a bigger town or a city.

Um But where we both went to school, it was very similar.

Some major differences that we notice is the sensitivity to learn information.

So

in Mr

Mba's interview, he touched based on how

if there was a sensitive topic in school, you learned it,

you didn't really have an alternative assignment.

Um When I was in school 10 years ago,

if parents did not want you to participate in a certain discussion,

there was alternative as assignments

and you would often be taken out of the classroom and put into another classroom.

During that time.

Um

So the sensitivity to learn information is very

different um along with the sensitivity

to the learned information,

um things that were talked about 40 to 50 years ago

may not have been taken offense to like it is today or 10 years ago.

So when you talked about, you know, slavery and stuff like that,

um

it wasn't as much of a social issue

as it is nowadays. And even up to the 10 years ago when I was in high school,

another difference was the consequence procedures.

So

Mr Morva mentioned that his

um consequences, he did receive physical punishment.

And today nowadays, even when I was in high school,

if a teacher were to physically discipline a child,

that would be probably a news article and

very frowned upon very bad,

the teacher would most likely definitely lose their

position if not get criminal charges on them.

However, when Mr Morva was in school,

that was

an OK thing and he went into his discussion about how

his mom was very upset that they use physical punishment and

you know, she went to

talk to the principal and

the principal didn't lose his job,

but

which is just wild to me because nowadays it would,

but back then they didn't.

Um social status is another thing

and this kind of goes with ability to

attend college a little bit as well.

So with social status, Mr Morva mentioned that people definitely had money

more than others. But money wasn't seen as a way

of like gaining popularity or gaining friends back then.

Like he said, everybody was friends with everybody

as opposed to my experience in high school.

It was kind of almost as like the keeping up with the Joneses.

The more you had, the more people liked you.

I remember I had a girl in high school

who had Brooke Hogan come to her 16th birthday party

and everyone dressed up all fancy and

they had performers singing there.

Um

And it definitely sparked her

popularity and how much people liked her. So

I definitely have noticed that over the time and the span of years,

what you have seems to have an influence on your popularity.

Um

and

that attributes to the social status

with that with the amount of money, the ability to attend college after high school.

Mr Morva stated it was more like for people to go

into the military or the trades. Um

There wasn't as many options for resources to attend college after high school.

So if you didn't have money,

uh it was definitely a lot harder

as nowadays, I know when I was in high school, we actually had

counselors who would have you come in and

prep to go get ready for colleges, help send out your um applications and

have you go scout colleges,

you'd have day two days um a semester when you were a senior

where you actually got off of school to go visit other colleges and it was excused

or do college tours.

Um

Those counselors would also help us apply for scholarships and funding. And

um it just definitely seems like there's more resources

to help people attend college nowadays

as opposed to what it was like back when Mr Morva was in

uh school.

On the other side of that,

the political driven aspects of learning,

Mr Morva stated that he did not notice or

feel that there was political driven aspects of learning.

However, I do feel like there

was in my schooling and that really just depended on

the individual teacher.

So you could tell that there was

definitely different views and opinions formulated.

And

I saw this specifically more in my social studies classes than any other class.

Um

learning about the different histories.

Uh you could definitely see personal biases in

those

history lessons and

there was definitely more sensitivity to different

subjects than there was other ones,

for example. Um

when we learned about the holocaust,

there seemed to be a lot more

sensitivity to that topic than other things such as slavery

or um

things around that nature.

So

although Mister Mor

Bay said that he doesn't see it as politically driven,

um

maybe it's just more prevalent today,

but it also, I think kind of contributes to

more knowledge that we have about

political stuff in government. And

I feel like nowadays people are becoming more opinionated and

willing to stand out than they might have been back

back in the time, Mister Morva was at school.

So

in conclusion, those were some of the major similarities

and differences that I saw

during my interview

with Mr Morva,

my big takeaway

from everything is that over time, the education system has

become a little bit more sensitive to certain topics

and desensitized to other topics.

Um I think social status has definitely had more of an impact as

the years go on as it did once before.

And laws and regulations have definitely became more strict.

They were more relaxed

back then.

And I hope you enjoyed my presentation.

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