My first year students are mostly seventeen and eighteen years old. When we talked about the 9/11 terrorist attack, none of them chimed in to say where they'd been or what they remembered. They were just little kids: they don't remember it at all. The kids who grow up in Big City Like No Other have heard about that day from parents and family members, and others learned about it in school, but they don't remember it. They're too young.
8 comments:
Oh, that is sad but also good that we have experienced a similar event. I hope you helped them know and now they will not forget.
:-( I didn't even say anything in class today, not only because we were incredibly busy, but also because I knew they would have been too young. Sigh...
Sadly there are some children equally young on the day who will remember. Whose lives were irrevocably changed.
It's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that fourteen years have passed since that day, and that a whole generation of people don't remember that day like I do and will for my entire life.
My kids saw video in ninth-grade world history, and in the midst of discussing the upset of the images, one of them said, "wait -- did you see this LIVE?" As if maybe I hadn't been sitting in front of the TV that morning in CT, watching the horror unfold. But of course, that's how time works: the last recedes very quickly for most.
It's understandable, but so scary. I've been reading a lot about World War II and the Holocaust lately and am seeing some frightening parallels in the Middle East, particularly with the refugees. But to so many, this is a "new" thing. The sense of history is sorely lacking. I remember the things I saw live (9/11 being one of them, but going back to seventh grade, the Lee Harvey Oswald shooting and of course the JFK funerals.) To me it is real life. To others, a documentary or chapters in a book. I suspect my parents felt that way when we knew nothing of Pearl Harbor. Something to think about.
Last year we observed two minutes of silence. As I looked around the library, watching mostly second graders stand tall for the first minute, and then begin to quietly fidget, I realized with a little shock that not a single one of my K-6 students was even born on 9/11/01. There was a dad volunteering that day and I shared the thought after everyone resumed their activity. We were both kind of stunned into another moment of silence.
My 18-year-old college first-year remembers, despite having been only four years old. but that's because she was actually at JFK that morning, about to board a 10 am flight to Los Angeles. It was traumatic enough an event from that point of view to have made an impact. But I'd totally understand most of the others not keeping that memory intact.
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