Teaching 9-11: Current Lake Forest High Students Grew Up In Post-Attack World

Paige Douglass was in second grade when the Twin Towers fell.

She had been at school all day and hadn't heard what happened. When she got home, her father was sitting in front of the television.

"I remember walking in, and on the TV there were the burning towers," she recalls. "I thought it was a movie."

Now a senior at , Douglass is part of a generation that was either very young when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred, or were not born at all.

For these students, 9/11 evokes complex feelings.

On the one hand, they experience the same sense of loss, confusion and anger that older Americans feel regarding that day.

But the day -- 10 years now past -- is also becoming increasingly foreign to many students whose sole frame of reference is a post-9/11 world.

Jim Gantt, head of the social studies department at LFHS, said the challenge of teaching 9/11 is to prevent it from becoming a plot point from a history textbook to students.

"We have to find a way to teach the history with the emotion that day brought," Gantt says. "Bringing that substance is difficult."

Bringing the Substance

On Friday morning, three days before the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, Kelly McKee's Contemporary Issues class rearranges their desks into a circle.

All week long, the class -- which addresses everything from domestic issues to globalization -- has studied that day.They have read Thomas Friedman; an essay from a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. They have poured over lists of key dates, key terms in the War on Terror.

They worked through a study guide with questions like: "What are the Nunn-Lugar Threat Reduction Programs? Have they been successful? Explain."

And, at the beginning of the class, a group of students put together a powerpoint presentation explaining the day's events.

Emotional Connection

But now, the books set aside and pens returned to book bags, McKee asks the students if they would like to share their recollections of that day.

Hands shoot up.

Their stories involve being kept in from recess, or being picked up early from school. Invariably, they involve parents home from work, sitting rapt in front of the television. And also the uncertainty: watching their parents and teachers awe-struck, trying and failing to make sense of what was going on.

Then McKee asks another question: Has it caused you to look at things differently?

It's an interesting question, because it's one thing to take a specific event -- especially one on the scale of 9/11 -- and remember what you were doing when it happened.

It's another thing to look at it, and all that's occurred in the decade since, and try to determine how it's affected you. Much of this doesn't immediately register as different; it's now normal.

Sophomore Noelle Wands, who was in Kindergarten when the attacks happened, saids she's come to realize how that day, and the decade since, have led us to relate to one another.

"It was more the years after, I realized we grew up in the mindset of racial profiling," she said.

Expanding Their Horizons

Gantt recalls teaching 9/11 ton a class last year where there was a group of Muslim students. He encouraged them to share their experiences of the decade.

"The other kids were shocked," Gantt said. "Some of them said afterward, 'I never thought I was prejudiced.'"

For Gantt, this is an integral part of teaching the subject: expanding students' frame of reference.

In class, senior Jack Green raises his hand.

"Looking back, 9/11 just made me pissed," he said, other students nodding in agreement. "I still just can't believe there's people in the world who would take innocent lives like that."

It's a confusion that resonates not just throughout the class, but throughout the country.

In rememberances each year, the word "surreal" is often used to describe that view of lower Manhattan. And indeed, there are few images in our collective consciousness so bizarre and terrifying, so unreal and shiver-inducing, than that second plane arrowing toward the second tower, lodging into its torso, sending an explosion of smoke and debris into the bright blue of the sky.

How then, does one teach something -- to students who will become, in the near future, no longer old enough to have experienced the day first-hand -- that those in their teens or adulthood at the time still have trouble wrapping our minds around?

"How Do We Remember That Day?"

Kelly McKee was in India the summer of 2001 on a Fulbright.

Every time she opened the newspaper, it seemed, there was news of a terrorist attack.

She returned home for the new schoolyear that September when terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

"It did jog my memory [of that summer]," she said. "We don't deal with things like that on a regular basis here like they do in some parts of the world."

Teaching 9/11 now, she tries to put those attacks in the context of terrorist activity around the world. (One of the central questions of the class is: What role should America be playing in the world today?)

"The class is about trying to get students to see the bigger picture," she explained. "I'm trying to present them with many points of view."

Another aspect of the unit involved asking the question: How do we remember it?

McKee has done work with the USS Arizona memorial, a symbol of another major attack on American soil -- Pearl Harbor -- and has incorporated the new Ground Zero memorial into the class materials.

But the real meat-and-potatoes of the "How We Remember It" question involves stories like the ones the students shared with one another Friday.

What is shared by people young and old, here and abroad, is a world forever changed.

"When I was younger, even a couple years ago, I wouldn't say it affected my life," Douglass says. "Since then, I realize it's changed my perspective on everything."