# 16 questions to ask your teenager about their school days

School is the first place a person is seen by strangers. These questions get the teacher who was feared, the one who noticed, the game in the playground, the day they left and whose decision it was. Ask in the car or while doing something else. Eye contact is the enemy of a teenager's honesty.

1. What is the funniest thing that ever happened at school?
2. What happens in the first ten minutes of school? Start from the gate.
   A ten-minute scene told start to finish is how a child learns to tell a story.
3. Who do you sit next to, and what do you talk about when you are supposed to be working?
4. What is the best thing in your lunchbox, and what do you trade away?
5. Which teacher would you want on your team if the school was attacked by dragons?
6. What is the rule at school that makes no sense?
   A child's case against a rule is the funniest, fairest writing you will get from them.
7. What are you the best in your class at?
8. Tell me about a time you got in trouble at school when it was not your fault.
   Injustice at seven is told with more detail than anything else in a life.
9. What does the playground sound like at break time?
10. What do you do on the way home from school that takes the longest?
11. If you were in charge of the school for one day, what is the first thing you would change?
12. What did you learn this week that you did not know last week?
13. Who at school would you pick as your partner for anything, and why them?
14. What is the thing at school you are secretly nervous about?
15. Who is the funniest person in your class, and what did they do last time?
16. What music do you hear at school? Where does it come from?

## How to use these questions

Ask by voice, not by form. Record it. One or two questions a visit is enough; the follow-up ("who else was there?", "what did she say?", "what happened the day after?") matters more than the next question on the list. Tender questions are marked; ask them once, late, and with "or would you rather leave that?" in the question itself.

## About Tellforth

Tellforth asks questions like these by voice, remembers every answer, asks the next question a good listener would, and writes a finished book from what was said: a memoir in the person's own words, or a novel built on the true story. You own every recording. https://tellforth.com