The high school experience has most certainly changed since the time I was a teenager, some 60 years ago. Partially explained by the fact that I was enrolled in a commercial school, and our granddaughter is obtaining her secondary education in an academic stream, leading to university.

She is learning things that would have been quite beyond my intellectual capacity, I'm certain, in science and mathematics, had I been exposed to them all those years ago. My husband, on the other hand, did attend a high school that prepared its students for university entrance, so he was exposed to complex math and geometry and Latin and the classics. Still, it amazes me that Grade Ten youngsters are given assignments that are so different than what I can recall having experienced so many years ago.

At that time, for example, there would never have been a focus in Canadian history on the immigration aspect of the population. Her history class's latest assignment is to delve thoughtfully into the entire immigration experience, and to compose a series of letters from someone who decided to emigrate from their country of origin to another country, halfway across the Globe.

Our granddaughter has sought my help, as she often does, when she has to compose something lengthy and requiring some details of which she has no familiarity. We discuss these matters and out of our discussion comes a minuscule but coherent look at what transpired in other peoples' experience which we become familiar with at a remove.

She's well on her way to absorbing that experience, not with any depth, but with some level of awareness of the difficulties involved, to produce a useful and imaginatively personalized piece of historical fiction, however brief.