IN THE CLASSROOM:Closing the generation gap

Kaitlin Shedd can credit her existence on earth to a mathematical error.

The Mariners Elementary School sixth-grader, whose grandfather lived in Czechoslovakia during World War II, learned a remarkable fact about her ancestry while researching a project for class. Her grandfather’s family, living in Prague during the Nazi and Soviet occupations, fled to Switzerland after the war before emigrating to the United States — and never would have made it if the guard at the border had been a little more diligent.

“They had one passport too little, but the guard counted wrong,” said Kaitlin, 11. “They would have been killed if the guard had counted right.”

Kaitlin was one of nearly 100 Mariners sixth-graders assigned this fall to interview people over the age of 50 and write reports on them. On Friday, the school honored both the students and their subjects with its annual Oral History Tea.

In the multipurpose room shortly before noon, students escorted the people they had written about — mostly grandparents — to the stage and presented them with copies of their written reports.

To add to the festivities, three students performed guitar and piano solos, and the school choir serenaded the crowd with Christmas and Hanukkah favorites.

For the last two decades, Mariners has had its sixth-graders report on their elders as a way of putting their own lives in perspective.

The teachers give each student a list of 100 questions to ask, and the students compile the answers into a number of categories: what transportation was like for the older generation, what kind of housing they lived in, what kind of medicine was available, and so on.

“It’s neat, because the parents learn things they didn’t even know about their own parents,” said teacher Matt Evans.

Nearly all of the subjects interviewed by this year’s class grew up during the Great Depression and had vivid memories of World War II. Clay Smyth, 11, said his great-grandfather was a Lutheran minister during lean economic times and often went out on Sundays to distribute food to the needy.

“She thought she was fortunate, compared to others,” Clay said of his grandmother, whom he interviewed for the project.

Sammy Singer, 11, said she learned from her grandfather — a dentist at Fort Irwin during the Korean War — how health care was much less advanced during his youth.

“If you had a heart attack, you would just die,” she said. “There weren’t a lot of treatments.”