Living history: LaRue County students hear firsthand account of Great Depression

Students at LaRue County High School stepped beyond the pages of a classic novel when a 96-year-old woman who lived through the Great Depression visited the school to share her experiences.

English teacher Hillary Powers invited her grandmother to speak with students as part of a unit centered on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The novel follows characters searching for stability and opportunity during the Great Depression.

Before the event, students researched the era and worked in groups to develop interview questions. Selected students then presented those questions during the program, asking about the hardships people faced and the qualities they needed to persevere.

“The kids are reading Of Mice and Men, and we have studied the Great Depression,” Powers said. “They’re also going to write an argumentative essay at the end of the unit where they’ll be answering the essential question, ‘What qualities does it take to survive?’”

Powers said hearing directly from someone who experienced the period gave students an opportunity that textbooks and literature alone cannot provide.

“Classic literature gives you a perspective on things that you’re not experiencing in your own life,” she said. “The value of having somebody much older than the students is that it gives them a real-life experience that they’re not going to get elsewhere. Not everybody just has a 96-year-old person willing and able to answer questions about a time that we’re not from.”

Ninth-grader Kenna Powers said students carefully developed questions that would encourage thoughtful and informative answers.

“We worked together with our peers to come up with interview questions that would help us learn about hardships and what qualities it takes to survive,” Kenna said. “We worked together in groups to come up with the best questions that would generate the best response.”

For Kenna, one of the most surprising lessons involved how frequently people moved while searching for employment.

“I know that it would be really hard to find work, but I didn’t really think about traveling all over the country to find work,” she said.

The event challenged students to connect their historical research and literary studies with the memories of someone who experienced the era firsthand. Those lessons will help inform their final essays as they consider what characteristics—such as perseverance, resourcefulness and adaptability—allow people to endure difficult circumstances.

By placing a primary source before the students, Powers helped transform the Great Depression from a distant historical period into a lived experience and gave the class a rare opportunity to learn history from someone who remembers it.