Putting it Into Perspective

As I was putting our day's agenda up on the board at school, I realized that today was September 11th. Actually I didn't realize it then, I did hear the coverage on NPR, but I started thinking about how it would affect our day at school.

As Linda and I were talking about what we were going to do, another teacher came into our class. Linda asked her how she (a 3rd grade teacher) was going to handle talking to her kids about it. She said that unless the principal made an announcement about it, she wasn't going to address it. "After all," she said, "These kids were only 1 or 2 when it happened." Linda and I agreed with her. Our kids in 4th grade were 2 or 3 at the time. Unless they watched the news or they heard about i from their parents, they would have no clue that today was the anniversary of a tragic day in our country.

I did find out later that Matt (the other 4th grade teacher did address it with his class. He treated it like a history lesson, that the kids needed to be aware of this important event in our country's history. I can see both sides of the coin, really. I will have to make that decision someday when I am the teacher as to what we will do.

Six years ago I sat in an Einstein's talking to the District Manager about what we were going to do for the rest of the day. I overheard a customer say something to another customer about a plane crash. When I went in the back of the restaurant to check on the baker, I heard a report on the radio next to the bake station. The baker and I just stood there staring at the speaker on the little radio. We looked at each other in disbelief. "That's really weird," I said. It was minutes later that I heard from another customer that there was a second plane. I was starting to get scared at this point. We had little information but continued to speculate about what we did have. It was such a foreign concept to us - planes crashing into buildings. There were so many times that I heard the phrase "this only happens in the movies" uttered that day.

The District Manager and I tried to get on with our day and make it as normal as possible. We quickly realized it wasn't possible. My cell phone rang all day - updates from Stein, my boss calling to see where I was and if I was traveling by plane, my friend Julie who said to me, "Think of today's date. 9-1-1. Isn't that weird?" I called Chris to find out if she was okay. She was scheduled to leave the country the next day for England to go to Karen's wedding. She had been running errands and didn't know what had happened. (I won't go into details about what she said as she cursed the whole time knowing that her trip probably wouldn't happen.)

That night, our neighbor Jamie came down to our apartment, and the three of us sat in front of the TV for hours on end. There was nothing new to report, but we just kept watching the coverage of the crashes over and over. We tried so hard to make it real in our heads, but it was unfathomable. Again, the phrase "this only happens in movies" was said again and again. It was unreal.

In the next few months and years we all tried to make sense of it all. We can't. It was a senseless act and it pains me that we had to be witness to it, whether we were there or watching it on TV.

My fourth graders today didn't say a word about it. When someone asked me what the date was to write on the top of his spelling test, I didn't blink an eye and said, "September 11th". The words coming out of my mouth had such a different meaning than the words entering his ears.