Interview with someone from a different generation

For my blog number two assignment I decided to interview my mother Mary. She was born June 19, 1959. She had three siblings and she was the second to youngest. I sat down with her for a while to discuss what her childhood was like and how it was different from mine and my other siblings. Right off the bat she says that technology is the biggest difference from her time to ours. She never had cell phones, ipods, or other electronics and they used to spend majority of their time playing outside. They had one tv, it was a color tv and nobody had tvs in their rooms which I believe is much more common now a days. Her favorite things to do outside was play with her cats and other animals. It was very quiet and peaceful. Nobody complained about much they just learned that everything happened for a reason and never really asked questions. They never had a new car and the car they had, had no power steering and was black and had no seat belts. They spent a lot of time on the farm and really appreciated and enjoyed the outdoors more than I think I did growing up. Another big thing was that the tv didn't play all night and didn't have many channels no more than 6 channels. It stopped at like ten at night and would resume in the morning. When I talked to her about this it was mind-blowing because now there is thousands of channels and endless things to watch. I think tvs plays a much bigger part in peoples lives today because its just something entertaining that requires little effort and there are so many things to watch. They watched Saturday cartoons but usually didn't watch that much tv.

She said that overall back when she was a teenager people got married younger. She said in high school she had a lot of friends who were married. She said it was very common for young people to have jobs. Her mom was a nursing assistant until she got married then became a house wife. She said it was also very common that once women got married they would just be house wifes and didn't have to work anymore. I asked her if women were typically considered equal and she said yes but they weren't usually viewed as capable as men more in the 50s and 60s. The 70s she said things started to change more and she never felt any restriction for being a woman, she always felt she could do whatever she wanted.

In school, she said things were always on the chalk board. They didn't have computers, so they had to write out all their papers in pen or pencil. This probably would be the biggest difference for me because now computers mean everything in school. Now we have projectors and all this fancy stuff its much easier to learn and work more efficiently. They had to do all math on paper and said usually only the teacher would have a calculator or an adding machine.  Also students were much more obedient because in her early school years teachers could paddle students. That would make kids pay attention more and is really weird to think about because now a days a teacher would be fired in an instant for such actions.