School students today have no direct memory of 9/11. Neither do many younger teachers, while veteran educators can remember being in classrooms on that Tuesday morning.
Those different vantage points sometimes factor into history lessons on Sept. 11, as discussions with two Peoria teachers illustrate.
Andy Davis teaches AP history and geography classes at Peoria High School. In 2001, he was a first-year teacher with a sixth-grade class in the Chicago suburb of Round Lake. On Sept. 11, a boy came in late after a dentist's appointment.
“He said something like, ‘I just heard on radio, there’s something about America is attack or something,’” said Davis. “I said ‘Come on, man. Just have a seat, knock it off, and let's get going.’ But within a couple of minutes, sure enough you started hearing the scuttlebutt, and you get online and it’s like, ‘Oh, man, what is going on here?’”
Davis remembers the school principal telling all the teachers to turn off their electronic devices, so he wasn’t fully aware of the scale of the attacks until he was on his way home. He says that by the following morning, teachers had to take on another responsibility: Helping students cope with tragedy.
“The kids came back the next day, and it was really interesting, because they were still really pretty shaken up by it,” he said. “These are kids that are 11 or 12, and hearing about all these different attacks, and nobody was really sure who had done it, or where they were, and what was coming next.
“Students were asking me questions like, ‘Hey, do you think our school could be a target? Do you think our town could be a target? ... So it was a lot of just me reassuring them, but at the same time not really – you know, who knew? Are they going to attack the Sears Tower?”
Mariah Riggenbach, a fourth-grade teacher at Trewyn Middle School, was only 5 on the day of the attacks.
“I don't remember anything from the actual event,” said Riggenbach. “I remember the one-year anniversary. My mom had something on the TV about it, and we noticed it and asked her, and she told us what had happened. But that's all I can remember.”
Riggenbach said most of her recollections of 9/11 center on lessons taught in school as she was growing up.
“We focused a lot on the heroes that had helped: the firefighters, the first responders. The other people in the plane, talking about how they were able to come to the rescue and save a lot of people,” she said, referring to the United Flight 93 passengers who overpowered their hijackers.
“Also honoring and remembering a lot of the people that had passed away, and remembering their legacy. So it was focusing a lot on the legacy of what happened and remembering the heroes that fight for us and keep us safe.”
Davis said a recent discussion of 9/11 with his students stressed the importance of teaching the day's historic significance.
“What's interesting is: I asked a couple of my classes of freshman, ‘What do you guys know about 9/11? When did you first learn about it?’ Because, of course, they weren't alive,” he said. “They were talking about how maybe it was third or fourth grade; that was kind of their first memories of learning about this thing that happened and maybe seeing some images in class or something.
“I said, ‘Did you ever talk about it with your mom and dad? Or was this something that was just purely at school?’ – and most of the kids kind of said they really learned about it at first from school.”
Davis said that recent class conversation took on more relevance in light of the recent withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s return to power there.
“They kind of asked, ‘Well, what were we doing in Afghanistan anyway?’ So they know about Afghanistan, because that's been their whole life,” said Davis. “I was able to connect that for them, and that was a moment that had never really clicked for them, that we were in Afghanistan because of 9/11.”
Riggenbach said Sept. 11 lessons for younger students generally take a different approach.
“We usually do a couple of days’ worth of just reflection and reading stories that have been published about the event; picture books and listening to people who have survived through the event,” she said. “A lot of times, most of the students don't even know that it happened until we actually talked about it in class. They don't even know what 9/11 was.”
Riggenbach said that as Sept. 11, 2001, moves deeper into history, the need to teach it in school only grows.
“I think as more time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to recognize the significance of an event,” she said. “Like when you talk about Pearl Harbor or something, we talk about it as a historical event, but then we move on because nobody remembers it or lived through it. So I feel like that's kind of the direction it's been going, that it's becoming less and less significant to some people and to some students, so I think it's important to keep that legacy alive.”
Similarly, Davis noted that each different generation has major “defining moments” in U.S. history from their childhoods that are embedded in their memories; for him it was the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, while for his parents it was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“I used to say that for the students, it’s 9/11,” he said. “But now, maybe it’s something that hasn’t even occurred yet, because 9/11 wasn’t in their lifetime.”
