Every June, on the last day, the leavers of Room 12 write a letter. Not to their mothers. To themselves — to the person they will have become in ten years.
Their teacher puts the letters in a metal box with a broken lock. She writes the year on the lid in white paint. Then she keeps the box for ten years and posts the letters.
She has been doing this since 1996.
"Write what you think you will be doing," she tells them every year. "Write the questions you want to ask yourself. And write the date, because you will not believe it."
Last week she posted the letters of 2016: twenty-two envelopes with new stamps on old handwriting.
"By the time you read this you will have finished university and you will have been working for three years. Are you a doctor? If you are not, it is not too late." — Bekzod, aged 17.
"By 2026 you will have forgotten the name of this street. I hope you have not." — Nilufar, aged 16.
"In ten years you will have been living in another city for a long time. Please telephone Grandmother tonight. Tonight." — Sherbek, aged 17.
Nineteen letters arrived. Two came back to the school, because the addresses had gone.
And one letter she did not post at all. She gave it to the writer by hand — because the girl who wrote it in 2016 is standing in that same room this September, in front of thirty pupils, with a red pen and a handwriting that has not changed at all.
She teaches mathematics in Room 12 now.
"By next June," she says, "I will have read my own letter to a class of children, and I will have been teaching in this room for one year. And they will have written their own letters. That is the whole job, really."
The box is under her desk. It is not empty.