Innocence lost: In the elementary classroom the day after 9/11

This is what I remember about September 11, 2001, and the day after.

I was standing at the front of the classroom at the chalkboard, teaching a lesson on subjects and predicates. We were using a textbook that was copyrighted 1988, one year before my oldest student was born. Kids were raising their hands to go up to the board to add the subject/predicate slash mark to the sentences I'd written.

A teacher friend came into the room and nudged me over to the bank of windows, out of kid earshot. She whispered something about two planes hitting the World Trade Center Towers, first one then another.

How I responded: “What’s the punchline?” I thought it was some sick joke. 

She said it wasn’t a joke and that the principal was sending her around to tell all of us teachers. We weren’t supposed to say anything to the students. There was a chance that some of our students might have lost family members. We had tons of kids who had family in the five boroughs. In an elementary school, panic and rumors can spread as fast as lice.  

As soon as she left, I opened the door that led to the adjacent classroom, I made a face at my colleague, one that asked, "Did you hear?" He nodded. His face was pale. He looked tired. I wondered if I looked that way too.

A few seconds later, a message over the intercom told us to turn off all classroom computers immediately. For the next three hours, like most of my colleagues, I received no updates. I didn't know about the Pentagon or Shanksville. I didn't know if Boston had been hit. I didn't know if my own kids were safe.

At my lunch, I scooted upstairs to the audio visual supply room, where no students were allowed and where the principal had temporarily set up a television for faculty. I saw for the first time what most everyone else across the country had been watching for hours: the flattening of the towers, the chaos in DC, the horror in Pennsylvania.

Our principal sat with us in a room that was silent, except for gasps or brief exclamations. She was retiring the next day after over forty years in the education profession. I wonder now if she was thinking back to when she started her career. Wonder if she was thinking about her own starry-eyed innocence as a young teacher. Perhaps she was considering what she'd lost over the years, due to the sights she'd seen, the personal stories of abuse and violence that students had shared.  

"This is just the start," she said. I remember wondering what she meant by that.


It was hard going back to class. We teachers struggled to keep our emotions reigned in. We all had trouble focusing.
 

After work I drove home in a stupor, listening to the news but unable to absorb any of it. I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts to get a coffee because I thought maybe caffeine would sharpen my senses. I remember standing in line behind two high school-age girls who were gossiping about he-said-she-said kinds of things.  The store folks had turned on a radio, and were waiting on us silently so they could listen to the news. The mindless chatter of the girls drowned out everything.  

At home my daughters, who were in high school at the time, told me they'd watched the news all day. "You know you're safe," I said.

Each of them gave me big sighs, eye rolls, and versions of: "We know. We know. We heard that SO many times."

Neither of them wanted to watch any more of it with me on TV. I watched the news for only a few seconds. The sights were too gruesome, the grief overwhelming. I sent out some emails to friends to ask if they were okay, and thankfully everyone I knew was fine.

One friend who lived in Jersey City watched it all happen from a window in her condo. She had a late morning appointment in one of the towers. She was heading to take the subway into Manhattan when the first plane hit. She turned around, rushed home, and watched the horror from her patio.   

Next morning, I stopped at a couple of stores on my way to school. I picked up the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. I wasn’t planning on reading these with the kids. I bought them because I wanted to read them later, on my own. I wondered how the day would go. I wondered what to say to my three groups of 11-and 12-year-olds. 

I decided to find out what they knew first. I stood in front of the classroom, watching carefully for body language cues. "So, what should we talk about today?"

Every group started yelling out about the attacks. Signalling for silence,I passed out paper and asked kids to write down everything they'd heard or seen. As they wrote ferociously, I paced the room and read their responses.

The amount of erroneous information was overwhelming. It was obvious that most grown ups hadn’t talked to their kids at all. Most of the students either knew about the events from kid word-of-mouth and thought that the entire city of New York had been destroyed and we were next, or had stayed up most of the night, unsupervised, watching graphic scenes of mayhem and death on television.

I’d gone to school thinking that I was just going to affirm for these kids what I'd told my own at home the night before and that morning before we left for school: "You are safe."

I never expected to have to deal with a question like this: “Are we going to die today?”

Or this: “Miss, did you see how those planes hit those buildings? Wow! It was just like a movie!”

Or this, from Miguel, who'd stayed up all night watching the news with his younger siblings. Miguel jumped up on a chair, flapped his arms like they were wings, and landed neatly on the floor, as most of his classmates laughed. "Did you see those people jumping off the buildings and flying through the air? That was so cool! I'm going to try that!"

From his buddies across the room: "Yeah! That was amazing. How'd they do that?"

It took several seconds to quiet down that class, as I thought, "What do I do now?" In my head, flickering like a black and white newsreel, I saw Miguel and his friends running home from school to their third- and second-story apartments, giggling as they rushed to their rickety front porches, hopping onto the railings, balancing for split seconds fifty feet up, diving, then breaking onto concrete pavement. 

I don't remember what I said, except I was stern and matter-of-fact, even while my head was spinning. I talked about height, velocity, moving objects, stationary objects, brains, spinal cords.  I did the best I could without getting overly graphic. I leaned back against the blackboard and pressed my palms into the chalk trough to keep the room in focus.


To this day, I can still picture Miguel hopping onto his chair, flapping his arms like the pigeons that roosted outside our classroom windows every morning, then jumping to the floor. But I still don't have words to describe what it felt like, watching innocence fade from young eyes, as I explained the reality that day, and the next day, and the next.