'When Our Teachers Told Us:' Alfred University students remember Sept. 11, 2001

[proud2BlibKansan]

Most traditional college-age students today were in elementary or middle school on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists aimed planes at New York’s twin towers, bringing down the World Trade Center.
For them, the first news, and sometimes the most poignant memory, is of being in a classroom and learning, from their teacher, what was happening.

“The majority of today’s college students didn’t comprehend their teachers’ despair until recalling the moment later in their lives,” said Dan Napolitano, director of student activities at Alfred University.

Napolitano teaches a two-credit course, “Drawn to Diversity,” that employs community art projects to draw attention to how diverse viewpoints, lifestyles, religions, and cultures understand and react to social issues. Students are given a weekly challenge, often relating to a news story or historic event, and asked to develop a project responding to it for the next week.

So it was logical that this week, students chose the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.
Today’s project, “When Our Teacher Told Us,” “focuses on the role of the school teacher in educating students” about events, such as the attack, Napolitano said.

more . . . http://www.alfred.edu/pressreleases/viewrelease.cfm?ID=6299

[MichiganVote]

1. I worked in an elementary at that time...it was a nighmare of a day

The children were fine, the adults were of the same mind, perplexed, then confused, then curious, then anxious, then shocked

Most of them turned on the TV's in the classrooms.Within an hour of that the parents came and came or called and called.

Thousands of miles from NY, the Pentagon or Pennsylvania, they felt threatened.

Bin Laden counted on that and he got it.

Fear.

Panic.

Children.

They will attempt it again.

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. The principal told us not to turn on our TVs

I argued with her. I felt like this was historic and the kids should see it. But I lost and the TVs were off.

At a school in our district where the TVs were on, a kid from somewhere in the middle east jumped up on his chair and cheered when he saw the plane hit the WTC. It took several teachers to pull the other kids off of him.

So I was glad we had turned off our TVs.

[MichiganVote]

3. Since there was no protocol and I was concerned initially about kids

whose parents were in the service or possibly traveling, I asked the teachers to turn off the sets. When they didn't listen, and I had no authority to compel them, I asked them to keep the sound off. Most did neither. The school Principal didn't want to get into it with them and he was very busy. He too thought it was a "historical" moment. Eventually Central office called and said no TV's on so they were all turned off. We had moved a set into the office area away from students and a teacher who was on plan watched the second plane hit the towers with us. She too felt this was a "historical" moment. I pointed out to her that is wasn't history yet and that kids coming to school for a regular day aren't expecting to watch bodies falling from the sky.

People were doing the best they could but no one was thinking too straight. Anxiety does that to people.

Edited to add that my son's in HS watched it all day in school. Be pretty risky business nowadays to do even that.

[LWolf]

4. I didn't have that experience; I was working a year-round calendar

and was "off track." I was also just home from the hospital, after a 5 day stay in ICU for a head injury. My son called me up and demanded that I turn the tv on; he knew that I don't watch tv news. I did. I felt bad. I watched for 10 minutes, turned it off, and never turned it back on. I never experienced the national fear, outrage, mourning, or anything else other than empathy for the victims and their families. That's probably because the head injury left me divorced from a large part of myself; it was a long recovery. I'd already experienced my own personal disaster in January of that year; one I've never fully recovered from, and my goal was to put one foot in front of the other and get through each day. Not being caught up in the media circus helped, too.

From the first day, I saw the reactions of the nation playing into GWB's hands, and that's what I've always associated 9/11 with: an emotional and political weapon against us in the hands of our own politicians.

I WAS, though, in the classroom the day that Christa McAuliffe went down with the Challenger. We didn't have the technology available that we do today; our principal quietly went from room to room and whispered it to us, leaving us to process it with our students as we saw best. That may have been the hardest school day I've ever had to endure.