It is hard not to see the plane, from all angles, hitting the tower, not to see the towers collapsing downward, not to see the Manhattan skyline blurred by dust and smoke.
It is hard not to sit in my car and weep.
I wrote those words less than a week after September 11, 2001. I was still trying to come to grips with it all, and in my line of work--teaching--I'm the one who needs to be steady, stable, and able to carry on. If I fall to pieces, I also let down my students.
At the moment of death for hundreds of people thousands of miles away, I was scolding my first block students for their misbehavior. It seems petty now, the fury I felt because they couldn’t handle themselves in the Writing Lab. It was nothing compared to the fury yet to come.
“Mr. B., did you hear what happened?” Ms. M said as I came out of the stairway after class.
“What?” I may have been short with her. I try to smile all the time, but that first block had me pretty angry.
“There’s been an attack,” she said. “Terrorists hit the World Trade Center and the White House.” News was still sketchy at the time. “One of the kids heard it on the radio just now.”
Still unfocused, I said something I don’t even remember, and headed back to my room to get some work done.
When our principal came on the P.A. to announce the attacks to the whole school, I half listened. I tried to dial up NPR.com as I worked. Nothing. CNN.com wouldn’t come up either. At that point, I realized it must be serious. But I kept working; I needed to be ready for my afternoon classes.
Then I headed to the library to make some copies, and found the fuzzy but heart-stopping television. I could not take my eyes off of it—the replays of the plane; the towers falling, live as I watched; the stunning news that there may have been fifty thousand people in the towers. The town I went to college in had only thirty-five thousand residents. Fifty thousand dead was unfathomable.
There were other teachers there. The library television was a homing beacon for those of us without TVs in our rooms. We didn’t say much. It all added up to something too big to wrap my head around, too vast to understand, too incomprehensible even to think about.
Our district Superintendent came out later that day with some unmemorable pablum, about being honest but not alarmist with the kids. I mean, let's be honest: Milwaukee is not a terrorist target unless they badly overshoot Chicago.
Of course, the National Education Association would develop a website of resources for the one-year anniversary. (That site was widely criticized, by the way, for a balanced and reasonable approach to teaching about the day that seemed, to some conservatives, not jingoistic enough.) A summary:
Designed to be a comprehensive resource site for teachers [. . . t]hese study guides mirror themes of democracy, patriotism and freedom.That was great for a year later. But what could I do right then?
In addition to the lesson plans, the site will also feature the Patriot Pack - text from freedom inspiring documents like the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Another link, Voices of the Past, Visions for Tomorrow will include excerpts from some of America's most famous speeches, among them Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream, and Cesar Chavez's United We Stand.
"Our goal is to show the history of the United States, to highlight American values of tolerance, democracy and freedom," Newberry says.
Among the lesson plans on the new site is one designed for middle schools students (grades 6-8) called "Let It Begin With One", which shows how a single act of kindness reaches epidemic proportions if repeated twice by each recipient. A kindergarten class could send Liberty and Faith, two patriotically themed stuffed bears - and a journal - to find out how students in the other parts of the country responded to 9/11. A lesson plan for high school students encourages them to visit Web sites remembering the uniformed heroes of 9/11.
I heard somebody on the radio describe the way everyone around was sleepwalking through the rest of that day. I know certainly I was just going through the motions. I was teaching Jane Eyre but my heart wasn’t in it. I was looking at classrooms full of children who themselves were subdued, sleepwalking.
I never felt unsafe, just unsettled. I felt as though I were watching my own life unfold on that fuzzy TV in the library.
The news that night was horrible to listen to, painful to hear. I am not ashamed to admit I had to take a time out from Peter Jennings and NPR to watch “The Simpsons.” Not all TV was all news.
I couldn’t think about grading homework. I couldn’t think about going to school the next day. I couldn’t think.
Lying awake in bed, after being up too late watching for the news that I knew would never come—that it didn’t really happen—I made a small decision.
Deep down, I’ve always imagined myself as the kind of English teacher Robin Williams would play in a movie, the kind of teacher who inspires students to rise above whatever depths life submerges them to and succeed beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations. I take summer courses with inspirational teachers who convince me of the power of narrative and the need for students to do work that they can believe in. I envision my students in ten or twenty years remembering the little epiphanies that I hope come every day in my class.
September 11, 2001, I realized, was a teachable moment.
As an English teacher and as a writer, there is nothing quite so important to me as narrative.
As the events of September 11 and the days and weeks following unfolded—locally, nationally, internationally—I kept thinking about how, in the past decade, historians, librarians, archivists, students, teachers, and many others have been desperately hurrying to record the narratives of what Tom Brokaw has called “the greatest generation” before they are gone. Even I, as a student, participated in such a project at the college I attended; I interviewed a man who spoke eloquently of the “Where were you when . . ?” moments of his life, such as FDR’s first inaugural address and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
So by September 12, it was clear to me what to do: My students and I decided that we would chuck the tenth-grade curriculum in favor of working right now to record the stories of this generation’s “Where were you when . . ?” moment. “Everything is changing,” I told my students. “It is our responsibility—for if not ours, then whose?—it is our responsibility to chronicle how Milwaukee changes, how we change.” The students and I each have written our own stories, and many of the students have talked with others, old and young, about the events of that dark Tuesday and the way, like a top spinning out of control, the damage has spread and touched us all.
I needed the students to be with me. My tenth graders, many of them the same ones who drove me mad the morning before with their refusal to stop talking, could not stop talking the next day. I tried my best to answer their questions, everything from carefully giving them the facts that I knew to explaining the Taliban and badly drawing a map of the world between the Indian subcontinent and the Persian Gulf. They seemed ready to go along with me in my plan, so I broached the subject.
“I have an idea,” I said. “It won’t be easy for you and it sure won’t be easy for me. But I think we need to make this our curriculum. These short stories we were reading, they just don’t seem real anymore. How can we talk abstractly about plot when we have all just witnessed the most horrible rising action the world has seen in decades?”
To a one, the students agreed. How many just wanted to get out of doing the regular work? I don’t know. But we agreed. The web site (since taken down) that we made is a testament to that decision. And I was right: It was not easy.
See, without the strict regulation a class syllabus provides we all seemed, for a time, directionless. The world was too full of information about it all—and that information seemed to change by the minute—for students to really get a grip on it. Thinking, day in and day out about the overwhelming scope of a disaster that touched us from so many miles away took its toll. Some students just were not ready to put so much of themselves into researching and telling stories as the task called for. Even I found myself wishing we were doing vocabulary instead. But we came out the other side stronger, I think.
The students were sick of talking, reading, and writing about the whole thing within a week. They were furious at the extent to which I made them re-do, revise, and rethink their work. They could not understand why there were so many stupid little steps to making a web page.
But as the site began to come together, and they could see the enormity of what they had collectively accomplished, they came around.
Among other things, I learned that chucking a curriculum in favor of following a teachable moment—even if it’s the biggest teachable moment any of us will see in our lifetimes—is much harder than it looks.
I learned that the server can and will crash at the least opportune times.
I learned that students don’t know how to spell the word terrorist.
I learned much, and I am not afraid to do it all again. I just hope I never have to.
[First published on September 11, 2003, at the soon-to-be defunct Open Source Politics. Cross-posted today at Liberal Street Fighter]
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