The 10 students hesitated at first. World geography teacher Scott Bendler assigned them to interview six older people who lived at Tabitha Village and two from the Latvian community. They would be matched with an elder, get to know him or her over several months and listen to their life stories, recording them using a laptop computer and an Internet site.

Students in their late teens, talking and listening to men and women decades — really long decades — older.

Victoria paired with Ina.

Brandon and Zach with Juris.

Abby with Virginia. Jessica with Freddie. Chris with John. Charisse with Rosalie. Alex and Jordan with Vernita. Kari with Ila.

In November they met. In January they began listening and recording.

The project wrapped up last week and there’s no more hedging. These Bryan Community students can say they’ve learned life lessons.

Kari Upchurch changed her view of elders.

“I always thought of the elderly as cranky old people who hate teenagers. I learned that they aren’t all like that. They just want someone to talk to and to care.”

If Jessica Rada gets a chance in 50 or 60 years to give some words of wisdom to young people, she will quote what Freddie Clevenger said to her in 2006: “You’re not better than anybody else, but you’re no less than anybody else, either.”

Freddie said she’s never felt any generation gap. She enjoyed her time with Jessica.

“These kids here are just like my grandkids, just like we were when we were young. … I just learned, as far as that goes, there’s more young people to love.”

John Peterson gave student Chris Cummings good insight into how to handle problems.

“He just took whatever he had to work with and made it work, and he’s happy and satisfied with it,” Chris said. “He had tough times, but he always made it through.”

Virginia Inness told her life story to Abby Hartshorn. About being passed from foster family to foster family after her mother died in childbirth in 1930, how she felt like an extra in each family rather than a member.

One foster mother, when Virginia was 8, treated her like the stepmother in the fabled “Cinderella.” The home was somber and unhappy, and Virginia was forced to herd cows and do other chores. She remembered walking through the fields to school one morning, crying, asking God why he had taken her mother away.

“She would tear up, choke up, stall on her words,” Abby said. “I didn’t know how much she wanted to talk about. I didn’t want to pry. I just let her talk.”

Through the project, Abby learned how to relate to people outside her own peer group. She learned to listen. And she learned these older people sometimes listened better than the students’ friends.

“She’s grown up in a completely different age than I did,” Virginia said of Abby. “My impression is, she’s going to do all right.”

The students recorded the stories on laptops secured through a grant from the Cooper Foundation. They put them together with photos from the elders and published them on the Remembering Site, a Web site where people can write and publish their life stories.

And they made a documentary about the intergenerational learning project and put it on a DVD with the help of Dan Senstock, a former LPS teacher in the Information Technology Focus Program and an Apple Distinguished Educator.

“Life Stories” is about the potential for change, Bryan Principal Becky Breed said at the Wednesday showing of the documentary at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center.

“We come to new understandings in a variety of ways,” she said. “Sometimes our best teachers are in places we least expect. … Story has a way of changing lives, of connecting across gender, racial and age differences, where what matters is not only the words themselves, but the emotions and meanings behind the words.“

Ina Grinbergs left Latvia when she was a child, forced to go with her parents to escape the communist regime. They took nothing but a few photographs.

Student Victoria Castaneda recorded Ina’s story.

“I like history,” Victoria said. “Ina has a good story, a good experience.”

Ina told Victoria stories of her childhood in Latvia and her teenage years in Germany, where her family lived in barracks. Ina came to the United States in 1959, after her sister, who had come earlier, paid the family’s way with a job at Russell Stover.

In Lincoln, she met her husband, Juris, who noticed her at the Latvian church soon after she arrived. In their native country, they had lived a half-hour drive away from one another.

“But we would never have met (there),” Ina said.

Ina’s father, a carpenter, got a job at Standard Planing. Her mother cleaned the First National Bank building.

Charisse Castillo interviewed Rosalie Horlivy, whose father came to the United States through Ellis Island in 1903.

“This is a part of history we don’t get to learn,” Charisse said. “Instead of reading it in a textbook, it comes to life.”

Bendler, who worked with Breed, multimedia computer applications teacher Susie Larson, and others to carry out the project, said the documentary brought tears to his eyes.

“I’ve never had an experience like this in 23 years of teaching,” he said. “The credit lies with the kids. They made the connection with the elders. They did the work.”

The project may get national exposure.

It has attracted the attention of Apple Computer and could be featured on its Apple.com Web site. The Remembering Site also has written to ask about using the Bryan “Life Stories” as an example for the Wall Street Journal, which is planning a story on the site.

Breed said the project was a wonderful way for students to learn about history and relationships.

“I wish this could happen for all kids.”

Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.