I was teaching and my first 2 hours were spent with my home room class, a mix of juniors and seniors, most excellent students and certainly one of the best classes I've ever had. We were on block scheduling which meant that the first 15-20 minutes of the morning we took care of home room business, watched the school announcements on TV and then we went right into a combo painting/art history class. Same students, but with about 20 minutes of business and 90 minutes of classtime. We watched the school announcements then I went to my office, just off my classroom, to finish morning paperwork. I could still see and hear the students in the classroom.
Suddenly the class was dead silent, but I hadn't turned the TV off and national news came on after the school news and I realized the TV was silent too. We are in central time here, so my 8 a.m. is NY's 9 a.m. I stepped back into the classroom. Mouths of my students were drooping in disbelief, their eyes as big as saucers. Wes, a senior, saw me.
"Ms. Brown, somebody's bombed the World Trade Center with a plane."
I'll never forget those words, it was happening as we watched. And watch it we did, as it played out in front of us. It was a nightmare for the students as well as for me. I was thankful I was with them, thankful that I was not alone and that they weren't. We all had a shocking dose of reality that day.
Wes, nor I, realized at the time that it was a planned event. He thought it was a bomb on the plane, there had been hijackings before. It took days for the reality and the repercussions to hit home. I remember for the rest of the school year our students wore those little American flag lapel pins. And if they didn't have one, they made replicas in the art classroom. Everybody wore those flags. And nobody forgot.
I know where most of my students from that year are now. I see them on Facebook often. And tomorrow, no doubt we'll all have the same memories, the same tears, the same patriotism that might have been forgotten somewhere along the way.
I wiped enough tears that day to last a lifetime, and shed many of my own. And now I sit remembering and it starts all over again. I hope the programs devoted to 9/11 bring the patriotism back home to all of us again. I hope we all learned something from that event.
Thank you, Ginger.
