9/11: Teaching tragedy to young students

The Sept. 11 attacks are something that many Americans lived through. They watched the twin towers fall, the clouds of smoke envelop the streets of New York City; maybe they even stared at their TVs in horror as the second plane struck. For individuals who lived through Sept. 11, 2001, many remember where they were that day. But for a majority of grade school students, Sept. 11 is not a memory — it’s a history lesson.

Mountain Brook High School teacher Joe Webb said he began teaching the event the year it happened.

Webb has been teaching U.S. history for 22 years and works with the 11th grade, so his students ages range from 15-18 years old. He said he wasn’t concerned about teaching the subject because he has mature groups of students in his classes.

“I was in the teachers lounge talking with the principal, and we watched it happen,” he said, reflecting on 2001. “So we discussed it some the rest of the day with the kids.” To cover the event, Webb created a discussion around the events from his own experiences and research surrounding the attacks. Talking about any subject, Kennedy said, can help students process the information better than a standard lecture and they learn from both each other and their teachers.

Webb said after one discussion, a student was curious just as to what terrorism was. 

“Some want to retaliate, but we explain, ‘Against who?’” he said. And for the most part, he finds the discussion to be helpful for students to understand the attack and its aftermath.

Derek Kennedy, seventh grade civics teacher at Mountain Brook Junior High, has students who are a little younger, around 12-13 years old. This is his third year teaching at Mountain Brook, and Kennedy said that as a civics class, they cover lessons on other countries and American history. 

He said teaching the attacks is “unique.”

“It’s not something that happened hundreds of years ago … it’s something that their parents and grandparents, maybe even friends, aunts and uncles, experienced,” he said. “I just kind of wanted to make it real for them.”

To make it real, he goes back to the day it happened. “What I do is play the live footage when they walk in the class without discussion or warning,” he said, to bring out the emotion students might have if it was their first time seeing it and it was real. He only tells his students the footage isn’t live.

Then, Kennedy assigns roles: victim, bystander, first responder and member of the government. “President of the United States is the one everybody wants to be but then decides they don’t after we get into discussion,” he said. 

He’s trying to get his students to view the attacks from a variety of perspectives by asking them what they would have been doing during the attacks and what their role would be as a way to garner empathy for those affected and create more understanding about the event.

“They seem to do really well with the discussion,” he said. “They seem to enjoy being able to kind of live in the moment as opposed to me just showing the videos.” 

His students take ownership of the lesson and look deeper into their learning, which Kennedy said helps there be “the respect for the event that it deserves.”

If time permits, after going through the discussion, Kennedy has his class take the online tour of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and see the monument that stands in the Towers’ place today. 

While some students may visit the site on family trips, he and Webb said they haven’t taught any students who were directly affected by the attacks. 

“A few knew someone who was there, but only peripherally,” Webb said. “It’s like knowing someone who was at Pearl Harbor.”

Kennedy said, too, that he’s hoping his students are noticing how the attacks have affected America today. 

“I’m just really trying to make it relevant to them and have them form a connection … I think sometimes kids have that disconnect [with history] of ‘Oh it happened 100 years ago, it doesn’t have an affect on me,” he said. “It [the attack] has an affect on them whether they realize it or not. They’re living in the affect.”