Dear Editor,
I recently read and enjoyed your article on 50 years of education at Hapnot Collegiate (“Hapnot marks a milestone,” The Reminder, Dec. 16). My reading happened to coincide with my finding a package that I thought had been lost in one of our family moves, and I am thinking that The Reminder is likely the best place to go to see if I can return these things to their rightful owners.
From 1978 to 1981, I was a beginning guidance counsellor and teacher at Hapnot and taught a course for grade 11 students called Sociology 205. In that course, I asked the students to write a page on “What I Will Be Doing and Where I Will be 25 Years From Now.”
I told students that I would keep those sheets and that they would be able to get their sheet back in 25 years so that they could see how accurate they had been in their predictions. Earlier this week, while going through a box of memorabilia, I found the set of sheets from one of those classes. The date on them was Nov. 12, 1979.
In that 1979-80 year, these young writers were 16 years old and were listening to new bands like Cheap Trick, Blondie and The Knack. Pong was all the rage. Russia had just invaded Afghanistan and Margaret Thatcher was elected.
There were lineups at the gas pumps, and American diplomats were taken hostage in Iran. In December, the music world lost John Lennon. Later, in the spring, Terry Fox began his historic run. Hapnot received its first VHS player and its first Xerox machine, and Hapnot staff and students were being introduced to the new Radio Shack TRS-80 – the first personal computer we’d seen.
At that time, their career plans included becoming a computer programmer, commercial artist, zookeeper, hotel manager, special-ed teacher, film director, nurse, paramedic, licensed practical nurse, classroom teacher secretary, dental assistant, social worker, medical records technician, sound technician, psychiatrist and accountant.
They planned to live in places like Edmonton, Red Deer, Calgary, Saskatoon, Hollywood, Banff, Brandon, Vancouver, Flin Flon, Nevada, California, Brandon and on the beach somewhere.
That was 37 years ago. By now, they will already have much of their working and family lives already well settled and defined. And I am hoping I can fulfill that promise from way back then and return these papers to these former Hapnot students, albeit about a dozen years later than I had planned.
I would like to invite any student whose name appears below to send me a Facebook message or email me at [email protected] with their address so I can mail their paper out to them. If interested, folks can also join the Hapnot Sociology 205 group on Facebook to connect with their classmates from ’79 and see where life has taken everyone.
The folks in this class for whom I have papers are: Lee Anderson, Melanie Ariko, Lori Barker, Sylvain Beauchamp, Lois Belous, Marilyn Bolton, Joy Bowman, Stacey Chigol, Kathy Dadson, Darcell Graff, Penny Highfield, Karen Jordan, Marsha Kiesman, Eileen Lysohirka, Sandy Perkins and
Traci Wright.
Cam Symons
Associate Professor
Faculty of Education
Brandon University
