![]() It was a place for kids to be real and talk openly. A far cry from the strict structure of math or science, Social Living, as its name suggests, was about life and its complexities. A legacy even larger than The Time Capsule Project is Rubin's class in which she assigned it called Social Living. This truthfulness runs parallel with the energy Rubin has always put out. "They all said 'yes,'" she says, adding that one father of a woman who'd been killed in a car accident was deeply moved. In these cases, Rubin reached out to the families explaining the project and asking if they'd like the personal letters of their loved ones. And one student has been missing since 1995," she tells us. "One student I had died by suicide, another in an accident. The project also revealed how some students wouldn't live to see their words. For one, many students asked Rubin what would happen if she died before mailing their letters. "It was magical."īut as happy and exciting as the project was, it shed light on the hard stuff. "It was like someone told me I was going to get a chance to time travel," says former student Aya in the documentary. In Hi, I'm Nancy Rubin, a documentary that tells of Rubin and her project, former Berkeley High students recall how much they loved what the project foreshadowed. As her inventory swelled, she graduated to pizza boxes. In the early days, she scrappily organized the letters in shoe boxes. Over the years, Rubin juggled boxes of letters to be mailed. After she stopped teaching, she continued to send those letters-eventually mailing the last one only a few years ago. From 1977 to 2002, Rubin conducted The Time Capsule project for every class she held, culminating in 10,000 letters. Rubin promised to send every one.Īnd she did. It didn’t matter if they requested six months or 20 years in the future. Then the kicker: The students were to tell Rubin when they wanted her to mail their letters. They were to mark the envelope with an address that would (hopefully) work in the future and include postage. In 1977, then a new teacher at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, Rubin started a project focused on letter writing called 'The Time Capsule Project.' Every semester, she assigned her students, most of whom were 15- or 16 years old, to handwrite a letter to their future selves. "And she said 'paper is the perfect listener.'" "I was reading a quote recently from one of my students who was only 14," Rubin tells The Sunday Paper over the phone. It was also a source of revelation for the young minds she taught. For ages, letter writing has been a means of connection.įor Nancy Rubin, a retired teacher, letter writing was an anchor.
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