The final paper

My grandfather just died, at the age of 87. It's relevant, I promise.

This past summer, when I started teaching "Human Growth and Development", I borrowed some ideas from a fellow professor's syllabus because I wasn't sure what to expect or what the best way to "bring home" the ideas was. One of the elements of this syllabus was two interviews. The first: To interview someone who was raising, or had recently raised, a teenager. The second: To interview someone in late adulthood (65+). This usually ends up being a grandparent of theirs.

At first I thought it was just a neat idea, so I adopted it for my courses. In reading these interviews, I have really been surprised by the multi-functional purposes that such a simple assignment can serve. First, the questions are student-generated, so they get to pick the topics they ask about. When you are speaking to someone who has lived so long, it helps the concepts, discussed in neat packages in our lifespan textbook, become more continuous and real. Second, it serves as a way to force students to have a conversation with someone they might not normally talk to. I noticed in the summary paragraphs, some of the students said that the interview was the longest conversation they had ever had with their grandparents. Third, it helps combat the feeling that sometimes the elderly may get when they may feel ignored or that "kids these days" don't interact with them in a meaningful way. Last, in opening the doors of conversation, it might give the students more ideas about other topics they may want to pursue in future conversations and may even be an "accidental" relationship builder.

Which brings me back to my grandfather. Last summer, before his health took a serious turn for the worse, I sat down with him (and my other grandmother) and asked about their families and what it was like when they were growing up. Since both of my still-living grandparents grew up in other countries, I have never met any of my great-grandparents, didn't know their names, their occupations, or what life was like for my grandparents as kids. To be honest, I was also asking so that I could develop a family tree and also to think of potential family names for my kids (I was pregnant at the time). I am so glad I had those conversations and took notes - my grandparents lived through some really interesting changes in history and it made me appreciate how much they had to experience in order for me to even exist.

I can see that some of my students are experiencing similar epiphanies in their interview projects. That makes me feel like this project was a worthwhile one, and I wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone looking for a student project to assign.