REGINA – A retired teacher in Saskatchewan is attracting international ears for a decades-long assignment involving his former students.
“I wanted them to look at where they were going,” said Bruce Farrer, who is from Fort Qu’Appelle.
In 1961, he asked his students to pen a 10-page letter to their future selves. For almost every teaching year onward, he asked his students to do the same.
He promised his students he would deliver the letters two decades later.
Last Friday, “Outlook”, a BBC World Service program, interviewed Farrer and a former student about the assignment at CKRM’s studio.
“’Dear Kenton, how’s it going? I am 14 right now and, probably, by the time you get this, you are a very different person. I’m 6 feet and I just bleached my hair so it’s very blond,’” read brown-haired Kenton Hamilton with a laugh.
The Regina resident, now 27, wrote the letter in 2001. He opened it for the first time during the interview.
“Kenton didn’t have much faith in my longevity, I feel, and so he decided that he only wanted his letter back in 15 years rather than the usual 20 that I suggested,” said Farrer.
Hamilton wrote about the September 11 attacks in his letter: “’All our teachers let us watch TV that day except for one.’ So I guess I was complaining about him,” said Hamilton.
The letter included a lot of filler, he admitted; he wrote about an episode of “The Simpsons” for two pages.
“It’s awesome to see how I was back then and how much I’ve changed, or how much I’ve stayed the same,” said Hamilton. “I think the 14-year-old would be alright with who I’ve become.”
Farrer estimated he has collected a few thousand letters. Of particular interest to him is that many students don’t share their letters with others.
“A lot of them were so infatuated with somebody in class that pages of the letter centered on this particular person, but it didn’t happen to be the person that they ended up marrying,” he said.
Farrer used to teach full-time at Bert Fox Community High School.
“I wish I had been my student. I would love to have written a letter to myself when I was 15. I wrote a diary, that’s the closest I’ll get,” he said.
Farrer, who substitute teaches, has a few hundred letters left to deliver.
“I don’t need a lot of things to do in my retirement. I’m busier than I was when I was teaching, I think,” he said.
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