Time Capsule Helps Seniors Reminisce

Alex Just could only laugh – and cringe a little bit – while looking back at who his favorite music singer was in 2000. The Chartiers Valley High School senior unrolled a list pulled from a time capsule and read the name Shania Twain.

He and a few other graduating seniors celebrated their last day of school Wednesday by opening a time capsule containing their photos and dreams from Ellen Zissis’s first grade class. Zissis and her former students laughed as they pulled out Pokemon trading cards and reminisced about asking the teacher to name her dog Britney Spears.

“It’s really cool to see how young everyone was and how everyone has changed,” Just said. “This is going all the way back and seeing everything that happened.”

The students wrote in first grade what they wanted to do when they graduated and even which person they planned to take to the prom. Zissis sealed the time capsule in the back of her classroom closet and let it sit for 11 year until this week.

She had never before done a time capsule for another class, but wanted to do it for the millennial first-graders. Zissis said she had long forgotten about the red, plastic time capsule until a few students reminded her of their upcoming graduation tonight at 7 p.m.

“The reason I remembered was a few of the students kept asking about it,” Zissis said. “The students helped spread the word (about opening it).”

She chuckled remembering that one student wrote he wanted to “take his mommy to prom.” Most of the girls, though, picked a boy named Ian as their future prom date, although he and several of these other first-graders moved out of the district.

Most of the predictions were wildly incorrect, but a few were close. Sarah Drudy wanted to go to Pitt to become a teacher. Instead, she plans to attend that school and study mathematics – a subject that wasn’t her favorite a decade ago.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. After a couple of years, I forgot what I wrote,” Drudy said. “It’s just so enjoyable. Everyone looks so different.”