How Do You Teach 9/11 to Kids Who Didn't Experience It? A Patch Investigation

In an old schoolhouse turned community center on Long Island, New York, a troop of Girl Scouts listened intently to U.S. National Guard Capt. Charles Sanders, a crisply dressed man twice their height who was standing at the front of the room.

Sanders was trying to explain the origins of global jihad.

Many years ago, Sanders said, the Soviet Union launched a "full-scale invasion" into Afghanistan. One civil war and an American military intervention later, a man from nearby Saudi Arabia named Osama bin Laden — “a black sheep, a radical,” the captain said — was so angry he decided to begin fighting beyond his home turf, on a global scale.

It was "a very significant change in history," Sanders told his hushed audience — one that would lead to 9/11, the worst-ever attack on American soil.

"We say we'll never forget, but we do forget, because time goes fast," Sanders said.

Such lessons are among the patchwork of approaches to teaching 9/11 in new and varied ways that have this in common: the generation now being taught has no memories of that day other than those manufactured in classrooms.

That has placed an especially profound responsibility on the shoulders of educators, including teachers left to determine on their own how, and even whether, to teach about history's worst terrorist attacks on American soil.

In dozens of interviews with educators, students and parents, Patch found differences across the country on when and how 9/11 lessons are taught to students — if they're taught at all. In some school districts, educators have created robust lesson plans that treat the attacks almost solely as an historical event. Elsewhere, lessons are wrapped in the emotions of adults who remember that day. Some state departments of education offer specific guidance on teaching about 9/11; others offer little or none.

In New Jersey and Long Island, areas close to the attack site and the homes to many of the victims, 9/11 is taught with somber trepidation. New York's education department instructs teachers to include the ramifications of 9/11, including the ensuing U.S. invasion of Iraq. On the West Coast, state guidelines call for lessons on the geopolitical state of the world before 9/11.

Some teachers focus solely on the patriotic response to the attacks, barely mentioning the devastation. Others share their personal stories of 9/11, including their profound sadness. Still others show students the graphic television coverage of that day seared in the hearts and minds of adults who remember.

Especially alert among Sanders’ small audience was 11-year-old Sidney Brewer, a petite Girl Scout and seventh-grader from Mattituck Junior High School with a dark ponytail and a bright smile.

After the talk, little Sidney told a reporter that she wished she could learn more about 9/11 at school.

Her mother, Nicole Brewer, seemed to approve. “These are teachable moments, beyond just cookies," she said. “... History is not always pretty. It's hard and it's tough to stomach sometimes. But on 9/11, you bear witness to what happened.”

Faith Ann Shipman, a classmate of Brewer’s at Mattituck, piped up: "It's important to take time to understand what happened.”

Monday, Sept. 11, 2017, marks 16 years since Sept. 11, 2001.

The gap in life experiences that has formed between generations has never been more apparent. America’s current class of high-school seniors would have been, at most, 4 years old on the day terrorists crashed passenger planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing thousands. Kids like those listening to Capt. Sanders were not even born.

U.S. history books — hastily republished soon after with a 9/11 section — called it an “unprecedented attack,” a “crime against humanity,” a “turning point” in human history.

But time has marched on since America’s darkest day, as time does, and billions of taxpayer dollars have been pumped into rebuilding Lower Manhattan. The area, once an ashen graveyard, has enjoyed a renaissance.

And even as the country’s grade-schoolers are guided through heavy-hearted ceremonies, not a single one of these kids will remember watching, in real time, as two planes plowed into two glassy Manhattan skyscrapers; as their trunks were ravaged by black smoke and bright fire; as an avalanche of dust and shrapnel and human bodies tumbled from the sky to the city grid below.

The towers were gone by 10:30 a.m. Nearly 3,000 people were dead.

Monday, Sept. 11, 2017, baby boomers and Gen Xers and millennials and across the country will relive personal memories — personal traumas — tied to these events.

“It's history now,” said David Bloomfield, an education policy professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York graduate center. “For these students, and even for some of the younger teachers, it's history.”

And like other critical moments in history, Bloomfield and other education experts around the country said in interviews with Patch, 9/11 must now be taught, not just mourned.

But how do you teach more than 3,000 dead to a 7-year-old?

“Students don’t remember a pre-9/11 world,” Bloomfield said. “What was life like at an airport or office building before 9/11 as opposed to since then? How has the world changed? That was a hinge moment. It’s important for them to be aware we didn’t always have lockdowns.”

Easier to want to tweak K-12 curricula than to do it, though.

States-rights advocates long ago ensured that U.S. federal education officials would not have the power to set any kind of blanket curricula for the county. That job belongs to education officials in each state, if they want it.

Turns out, many of them don’t. Most teach from lesson plans shaped by their own experiences.

An extensive survey of state education departments conducted by Patch last year showed that well over half of the nation’s 50 states have chosen not to include specific historical topics — including 9/11 — in their list of mandatory lessons.

So the current reality in the K-12 system, for better or worse, is that 9/11 lesson plans (or lack thereof) are largely left up to local school districts, school administrators and — most often — individual teachers.

Many history teachers don’t formally teach the subject: They have a hard enough time teaching up to the 1980s by the end of the school year, various educators told Patch.

A large number of American kids, then — although it’s impossible to say how many, due to an absence of comprehensive studies on the topic — are learning about 9/11 in a current-event format.

Teaching heroism v. tragedy

In the freeway-side town of Rancho Cucamonga, California, Monica Stewart, a sixth grade teacher at Los Amigos Elementary School, spared her students the gory details from Ground Zero. She opted instead to tell them stories of everyday heroes who died saving others.

Death and bravery were big themes.

“I feel sad for people who risked their lives to help others. They wanted to live,” Fernando Carbajal, one of her students, said after the lesson. A girl named Isabel Dorn added: “Imagine your mom or dad walking in there. People risked their lives and died.” Stewart nodded. This is why, she told her class, “we must be thankful and cherish our families every single day.”

Meanwhile, in suburban Chicago, Mike Albiniak, a social studies teacher at Naperville Central High School, said he planned to show his students disturbing video footage of the attacks.

"Quite frankly, that’s the only way to understand how horrific it truly was,” he said.

The fifth-graders in Suzy Gebhart’s class at Bascomb Elementary School in Woodstock, Georgia, commemorate 9/11, which she prefers to call Patriot's Day, with mini apple pies, mini hot dogs and small cups of Coca-Cola — an annual tradition in her classroom. They’ll watch a kid-friendly PowerPoint presentation on the events of 9/11 as Gebhart helps “guide the facts,” she said, and listen to a recording of Lee Greenwood singing "God Bless America" (the 9/11 tribute version).

"We all wear red, white and blue and create a flag made of linked construction paper strips to demonstrate ‘united we stand,’” the teacher said.

Jennalee Kwezi, a 10th-grade history teacher at Westside High School in Houston, told the Scripps News Service that, most years, she’s apt to cry while giving her high school students a verbal history of 9/11. “That always brings some of them to tears because it makes it a little more real for them,” Kwezi said.

History teacher Sean Robertson, who teaches seventh- and eighth-graders at Harlem Academy in Manhattan, won a national award last year for his approach. Robertson instructs his students to pretend it’s their job to curate exhibit items at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum — a little girl’s shoes from Ground Zero, for example.

The point being, Robertson told the Scripps News Service, to make students wonder: "How do you tell the story of that day, while keeping the idea of empathy? How do you not re-traumatize people but tell the story?"

At Stuyvesant High, a high school in Manhattan that's situated just blocks from Ground Zero, students in Michael Waxman’s social studies class can expect a series of 9/11-themed guest lectures and field trips throughout the school year. Last year, for the anniversary in particular, Waxman has asked his students to interview at least two adults who remember the attacks.

Next door, in Lisa Greenwald’s social studies classroom, she opted for a sort of counter-lesson: She’ll instead be talking with students “about memory and history and asking them to think about how memory plays into the making of history and how it is useful and complicated in accounting for the past,” she said. (“There is some ambivalence [among certain teachers] about teaching commemorative history,” Greenwald added in an email to Patch.)

The interview-an-adult approach is popular in other parts of the country, too — even in places where the adult’s memory might just be of a TV screen. Sandi Price's students at Knox Elementary School in Canton, Ohio, were assigned to conduct three brief conversations with parents, relatives or family friends who remember 9/11.

"This allows discussions at home to help build background knowledge," Price said. And the kids "love being able to share” the anecdotes with their classmates.

Down in Cartersville, Georgia, too — at Cartersville High School — video-broadcasting teacher Tyler Putnam instructs his students to interview several teachers, along with the town’s mayor, about their memories of 9/11.

"They were able to hear from people they know who actually remember and lived through the attacks,” he said, helping them “better understand the events that took place that day and how it affected the world we live in today."

A struggle for teachers

In the fall of 2001, Jeremy Stoddard was a fresh-faced, 26-year-old graduate student at University of Wisconsin in Madison, trying to find a line of inquiry that spoke to him as a scholar.

Like most Americans his age, Stoddard remembers where he was when the towers fell.

“I was driving to a school in Wisconsin where I was working doing educational technology professional development — and remember hearing the initial news that a small plane had hit the tower while I was in the car,” he wrote in an email. “Throughout the day we looked at updates online and watched the live feed in the library at the school with high school students.”

“One of the reasons I remember this all vividly,” he said, “is because a colleague who I was working with that day has a brother who flew for American on the route and type of plane that was used for one of the hijackings — it took her a couple of hours to know for sure that her brother was not flying that day.”

In the year that followed, Stoddard’s adviser, Diana Hess, began tracking various efforts across the country — both official and unofficial — to teach grade school kids about 9/11.

Little did Stoddard know that, 15 years later, he’d still be one of the only scholars wading through the murky and controversial field of 9/11 pedagogy.

“It’s sort of the study that we wish that would go away,” Stoddard said of his work with Hess.

“We wish these events weren’t so relevant,” he explained. “We wish we didn’t still see troops in Afghanistan. We wish 9/11 weren’t still a contemporary issue, but unfortunately it is.”

In the first few years following the attacks, Stoddard and Hess wrote in their published findings that on the nonprofit front, different organizations were writing curricula with wildly different takes on 9/11 and its greater implications, largely based on each organization’s agenda.

And in almost every major U.S. history textbook that added a chapter on 9/11 in the immediate aftermath, Stoddard said, he and Hess found the content surprisingly devoid of both facts (numbers, names, etc.) and mention of public controversy and dissent.

In these early lessons, the scholars wrote, 9/11 was presented unilaterally as “an attack that brought Americans together and the rest of the world in support” — supplemented heavily by photos of the American flag. The books’ own definition of “terrorism” constantly contradicted its usage.

“We were surprised by the way in which one event could be used by curriculum and textbook providers toward such diverse curricular, pedagogical, and ideological ends,” they wrote.

But in the next round of textbook updates, circa 2010, Stoddard and Hess watched as these same book manufacturers beefed up details on the 9/11 attacks and, at the same time, peppered in some discussion of “national weariness over fighting two wars” and “the controversy over the economy at home.”

It was almost as if they were watching history rewrite itself.

“Generally, the people who influence [American curricula] the most are the textbook writers,” said Bloomfield, ed-policy professor at Brooklyn College. “In an odd way, the Macmillans have responsibility for the national narrative.”

Stoddard and Hess last year updated their state-by-state study for 9/11’s 15th anniversary.

They found that in the five years since the 10th anniversary mark, a few exemplary state governments took the initiative to beef up their standards doc with bullet points on teaching — and, even more critically, analyzing and discussing — 9/11 in the classroom.

In California’s brand-new 2016 education standards, for example, two meaty paragraphs are now devoted to exploring the pre- and post-9/11 world. (“Did 9/11 change everything? Or was the world in the 1990s less stable than it might have appeared at the time?” the document says.) New York’s State Department of Education also recently bulked up its standards with 9/11 references. (“Students will examine the decision to invade Iraq, which was based on allegations concerning weapons of mass destruction, and trace the course of the war.”)

“This does not guarantee, however,” the scholars warned, “that these [standards] will be taught in an open or deliberative way or in a way that necessarily requires higher order thinking.”

And there are still states like Texas, whose education standards go so far as to intrinsically link terrorism and Islam.

During classroom discussions of 9/11, Bloomfield said, “Matters come up that are controversial and sensitive. Professional handling of controversial subjects is a skill. And some teachers,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “are more proficient at handling those matters than others.”

Reflection v. Remembrance

Stoddard saw 15 years of watchdogging put into action last year, when a coalition of organizations — the Newseum in Washington, D.C.; Families of September 11; and New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education — tapped him as an adviser on two major curriculum projects. Teachers around the country can access all the material for free.

The Newseum project, called “Freedom in the Balance,” challenges kids to explore their relationship with freedom versus safety.

“We’d like to see these resources used as a point to have some of these crucial conversations and help us move on as a nation,” said Barbara McCormack, Newseum’s vice president of education.

McCormack counts herself among a careful new movement of thinkers who want to let kids explore 9/11 as a point of reflection on modern society more than a Day of Remembrance.

“We know teachers are very anxious about teaching stuff that has such polarizing views,” McCormack said. “But this is a moment of history now for kids. Whether it’s WWII or 9/11, this is something that happened in their past.”

“We know that the students are ready,” she said. “The parents, the administrators, the teachers aren’t as ready.”

Newseum’s new interactive lesson plan, she said, aims to take 9/11 as a subject matter from “provocative to productive” by giving teachers and students “the tools to prepare to talk about the controversial impacts 9/11 is having on our attitudes, our perceptions, the way we potentially vote.”

On the other hand, Brooklyn College professor Bloomfield said he would warn against “sterilizing” the events of 9/11 to such a degree that future generations don’t appreciate what all the fuss was about.

“The human toll of it has to be part of how we take it up,” said Elizabeth Dutro, a professor of literacy studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Dutro, who studies the ways trauma can be addressed in the classroom, said the emotional vulnerability created by a class visit from a 9/11 survivor, or even just an anecdote from a teacher, could help “open up a space for learning.”

Whatever the pedagogy, though, America’s young folks seem to be open and ready to dig deeper into 9/11 and its repercussions.

Andrew Jordan, a 24-year-old Long Island resident who was in fourth grade when his father Andrew Brian Jordan, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11, said that in his job as a teacher in Teach for America, he didn’t feel like 9/11 came up nearly enough in the classroom. "I believe more should be done to teach kids about what happened," Jordan said. "In today's world, what happened on 9/11 changed the course of United States history and has impacted the American government's decisions on many important issues.”

Jordan’s mother Lisa said education needs to begin early."If they don't start teaching it now, when are they going to start?” she asked last year. “It's been 15 years already. It changed the world — why not talk about it?"

Information for this article was gathered by reporters across the Patch network, which includes nearly 1,000 sites in California, Connecticut, District Of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, US, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. It was written by Simone Wilson.

This article was originally published in 2016

Main Image via Shutterstock

Black-and-white image of 9/11 memorial in Manhattan by Michael Korcuska via Flickr Creative Commons

Image of first responders at the scene by Metropolitan Transit Authority via Flickr Creative Commons

Image of man standing at 9/11 memorial in Manhattan, Patch stock photo

Image of white flower at 9/11 memorial in Manhattan by Renee Schiavone/Patch