On September 11, 2001, I was nearing the end of my planning period at Jeffersonville High School and had gone to the office to check my mailbox. Barb Trouy, our receptionist, was on the phone with a worried look on her face. I heard her saying comments like, “Oh, no. Do they know why?” She hung up and asked me if I happened to have my television on in my classroom upstairs. When I said no, she told me to go turn it on because her sister had just called and said someone had blown up the World Trade Center again.
I hurried to my room and turned on the TV. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I just sat staring at all the images and listening to newscasters trying to make sense of it. There was so much confusion because no one seemed to be sure what was going on. Was this just a horrible airline accident? Was it done deliberately? I remember thinking that all of the news reporters seemed overwhelmed by the uncertainty, and as a trained journalist, I kept trying to process the information in my head the way they had to be doing, too.
The bell rang for second block and my IRT (instructional resource time) students filtered in. They were juniors who were not in the midst of state-wide ISTEP standardized tests, as all our freshmen and sophomores were that day, so many had already started to hear or see the news. This was right at 9 a.m. It was strange to see everyone enter the room and then become transfixed, staring at the television. A normally chatty bunch of kids just fell completely silent and gathered on chairs, on the floor, and sat on top of tables, circling near the TV. It seemed I could barely even hear anyone breathing. Expressions ranged from horror to shock to stoic to tears. As we watched—live—the second plane flew into the second tower, prompting gasps and shouts that broke the silence. “Are we going to be attacked all over the country?” a boy asked. I couldn’t even find my voice to answer, and once we found out that the Pentagon had also been hit, his question seemed to be a real possibility. I saw a few kids shoot nervous glances out the classroom windows, searching that sunny, bright blue September sky for planes.
The rest of I.R.T. passed in a blur. Kids were so frightened and confused. One of the girls collapsed in tears because her older sister was living in Manhattan. She fell to the floor crying, “I have to talk to my sister. I hope she didn’t try to go to work today.” I finally let her go back in my newspaper office, shut the door, and get out her cell phone. I told her to keep dialing until she finally got through to her sister, which she eventually luckily did, considering how most communications into and out of Manhattan had completely jammed. Students’ emotions were swinging from sadness to anger to total disbelief, and I felt powerless to comfort them because I didn’t understand it either. They wanted to know if we were at war, and I couldn’t answer them. It was probably my hardest day ever as a teacher.
When the bell rang for the end of IRT, most of the students were reluctant to leave. All sense of normalcy in the school day had been abandoned. As my next class came in, freshmen and sophomores were just getting their first glimpse of the day’s situation since they had been in testing all morning. Many grew angry at the realization that the situation had been kept from them by the school administration so they could complete their testing that morning. The kids could tell how visibly upset I was, and I tried to get them up to speed on what was going on, as much as we knew. When I explained, with tears in my eyes, that my I.R.T. and I had watched the second plane fly into the second tower, one perpetually troublesome student said, “Cool! Are they gonna replay it?” I think my head spun around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. I shouted at him how that was most certainly NOT cool—that these were real people dying, and it wasn’t a video game you could just hit “reset” on and start over. I almost started to cry as I wondered just what we had done to this generation by exposing them to so much violence in their entertainment and media that one of them could think this was “cool.”
