I teach 9/11
Eleven years ago, the day began with a sky as blue as today’s, the air as crisp as a back-to-school outfit. An hour and a half into my morning email routine as a technology integration specialist, my supervisor’s voice exploded from the conference room down the hall, “Candy, come quick! It’s a catastrophe!” The rest of the day unraveled in glimpses of TV sets through classroom doors as I tried to maintain normalcy inside a high school filled with gasps and to respond to email requests for news updates from elementary teachers behind news blackouts designed to protect the very young. The slide show of that day replays every time I watch or hear the tales again. As Americans, we tell our versions over and over. As a teacher, I want our children and teens to hear them. I teach 9/11.
I have a son who has flown his jet in Afghanistan on missions I will never know about. He began the path to those missions on
9/12. I have numerous former students who have followed similar paths. Those who were old enough to remember 9/11 tell their stories in their own ways just as my parents, teenagers during Pearl Harbor, told theirs. I remember realizing as a child that the lesson in my history class was my parents’ high school reality. Many times since then, especially as they aged, I asked for more detail. Teachers themselves, they willingly told me what they could recall, tinted by their perspectives of a World War and all the decades since. I don’t recall them ever being the ones to bring it up, though. But if I asked… they taught Pearl Harbor.
Now I have grandsons too young to know 9/11. I know college students, teens, and tweens who have no solid recollection of that blue sky, calamitous day. As teachers, we must tell the stories. We must point our students to read and listen and understand what is beyond today’s clear sky and memorial bells. I know this day will always make me stop and think and want to tell the story. I utter a quiet “YES!” when I see sites like Moment Tracker. I want to be sure that someone is telling the story so our children will continue to ask for it. I teach 9/11.
