One of my granddaughters sent her four grandparents a list of questions she needed answered for her sociology class.

The 18 questions were all about our high school years. I believe they were to show how high school might have been different in the “olden days” as compared to today. OK, they didn’t actual say “olden days” but that was certainly what was meant.

I answered the questions as best I could. They included what classes I took, what activities I was in, things like that.

However, there was a lot more I wanted to tell her, because, you know, I am a newspaper editor, and when you ask an editor about something, he has to write about it. In detail, too.

So here goes, Kamryn.

High school 50-plus years ago was not all that much different in many ways from what I think it is now. (Although, to be totally honest, I am not sure I really know what it is like now.)

We went to school, took math, English, history and science classes, maybe played some sports, hung out with our group of friends. We dated some and tried to figure out what the heck we were going to do after graduation. I’m thinking you probably do much the same now.

There were the jocks, the nerds, the hoods, the cute cheerleaders and, in those days, the new group who were growing their hair long and chanting ‘peace not war’ and would soon become known as the hippies. Some kids smoked cigarettes and drank, but to be honest, I didn’t know anyone doing drugs, not even marijuana. And I went to a big high school in Colorado, for crying out loud. I think drugs hit my high school campus the year after I graduated in 1968. Or I was blissfully unaware of any drug use, because I hung out with the smart, well-behaved kids for the most part.

We were expected to behave back then. We had two high school principals – one in charge of curriculum and the other in charge of discipline. (Think Mr. Strickland in the Back to the Future movies.) And we had parents who were allowed to smack us upside the head if we had any issues at school. (OK maybe not really any physical punishment, but they could – and did – discipline us, at least threaten to ground us until we were 35, if we were bad.)

Our teachers were always addressed as Mr. This or Mrs. That. Never, ever, first names. I was never sure they even had first names, until I saw them listed in the annual, which is now called a yearbook, by the way. And all the teachers wore ties for the men and dresses for the women.

You might be interested that there were no formal sports teams for the girls back in my day, only the boys. The girls only had intermural sports.

There were other differences, as well. There were no computers or Internet and no cell phones. We could not quickly Google something if we didn’t know the answer. We had to read books, listen to teachers teach and take notes in notebooks.

And, we had to talk to our friends face to face, not on a cell phone. Or call them on the one rotary dial, land-line telephone in our home.

We didn’t have social media either. There was gossip of course, but it had to be done in person so it was pretty limited. It couldn’t be posted on Facebook or Twitter for everyone to see. Forever.

There was the in-crowd and the outcasts. That probably still is true today as I doubt it will ever go away. Many people back then were not as tolerant as today, and kids who were different got called some pretty nasty names, names we don’t use anymore, hopefully. I’m hoping there is not as much of that today as there was back then.

There is another big difference. Back in those “olden days” we felt pretty safe when we went to school. We never, ever, thought about someone bringing a gun to school and shooting the place up.

It was long after I graduated that a high school just a few miles down the road from mine in Colorado, Columbine, had one of the most notable school mass shootings. It happened in 1999 and there were 15 deaths, including the two shooters.

Granted, there had been many, many school shootings before that, in the 1970s and 1980s, but Columbine seemed to strike a nerve across the nation,

Do you kids today spend much time thinking about this ever happening at your school? We practiced fire drills. Do you practice shooter drills today?

Some of my high school memories are a bit slanted, I admit, just because I went to a pretty large school with hundreds of kids in my graduating class. I am a bit jealous of my friends I have today, who went to small-town high schools in Minnesota with 100 or fewer students in their class – and they knew every one of them.

So, was high school better or worse back in the “olden days?” I think the answer is that it wasn’t all that different from now and maybe in some ways it was better, but in other ways it was probably worse.

We all hope it is better today than way back then, and will be even better in the future. Thanks for asking, Kamryn.