Ten years ago today
Sep. 11th, 2011 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
judifilksignI was teaching my class of deaf and hearing students. Someone staggered into my classroom, and just told us to turn on the T.V. We saw the first burning tower.
We were still watching, live, when the second plane hit. We watched, the adults taking turns interpreting the broken words of shell-shocked reporters for the deaf students, for much of the coverage was so live, there was no closed captioning.
We cringed at the Pentagon, and lived in fear as they said they'd grounded all flights, but that there were some still in the air, headed for Washington.
I wrote a timeline of events on the board as they happened, and then wrote down the essentials in a book I had on the shelf the kids loved reading: On This Day, headlines of years past day by day.
"You're writing in a BOOK!" they exclaimed.
"This is history in the making. Generations of people will study and remember this moment, long after we have died," I said. I didn't even feel pretentious as I told them that. They watched me seriously as I wrote in the margins of the book, on 9/11.
The therapists told us to turn off the televisions so that we did not produce post traumatic stress disorder with the constant replay of the horror. The last images my students saw of the day were the thousands of New Yorkers walking quietly across the bridges away from town. One of the boys said, "There must be a lot of cell phones at the bottom of that river, since the booster towers were the towers."
On this, the tenth anniversary, I was struck by how many of my students were only preschoolers, or first graders, at the time of the attacks, and have no real memories of a time when we were not at war.
We were still watching, live, when the second plane hit. We watched, the adults taking turns interpreting the broken words of shell-shocked reporters for the deaf students, for much of the coverage was so live, there was no closed captioning.
We cringed at the Pentagon, and lived in fear as they said they'd grounded all flights, but that there were some still in the air, headed for Washington.
I wrote a timeline of events on the board as they happened, and then wrote down the essentials in a book I had on the shelf the kids loved reading: On This Day, headlines of years past day by day.
"You're writing in a BOOK!" they exclaimed.
"This is history in the making. Generations of people will study and remember this moment, long after we have died," I said. I didn't even feel pretentious as I told them that. They watched me seriously as I wrote in the margins of the book, on 9/11.
The therapists told us to turn off the televisions so that we did not produce post traumatic stress disorder with the constant replay of the horror. The last images my students saw of the day were the thousands of New Yorkers walking quietly across the bridges away from town. One of the boys said, "There must be a lot of cell phones at the bottom of that river, since the booster towers were the towers."
On this, the tenth anniversary, I was struck by how many of my students were only preschoolers, or first graders, at the time of the attacks, and have no real memories of a time when we were not at war.
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Date: 2011-09-11 05:56 pm (UTC)Your writing headlines in the margin of that book was truly teaching in the moment. I bet your students still remember that.
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Date: 2011-09-11 06:07 pm (UTC)Ten Years Ago
Date: 2011-09-22 08:39 pm (UTC)