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story368.xml

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2002-04-08

My principal concern on September 11th, after contemplating the sheer human tragedy of it all, was how to deal with the events as a history educator.

Teaching at a small community college, I knew that I could not approach the classroom as the typical day, particularly coming from a historical perspective. While loathing the cliche "history in the making," I knew that for my students the events of the day would be that type of generational reference point such as Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, the moon landing, Challenger, etc. Therefore, I decided the most responsible thing I could do was to tell my students to make their classrooms in front of a television set or radio.

While I was trying to arrange for a video feed in our main liberal arts building, our resident political scientist negotiated the placement of a television set in the lobby of that building. There was where many of my students attended class that day along with hundreds of their peers.

My colleagues and I watched the students as much as we watched the news on the television since we felt that we were learning as much about our students and their private feelings as we might ever learn. Despite administration reminders that September 11 was "business as usual," those social science and humanities instructors--at least along my corridor--knew that perhaps the most valuable lesson that our students would obtain in their two years with us was unfolding before their very eyes.

I told my students to consider not only the events themselves but also the reporting of the events. When I got together with classes on Wednesday and Thursday, much of the planned lessons on colonial America and ancient Greece were displaced by energetic discussions of terror and its consequences, American hegemony and the world, personal experiences of loss and suffering, and so forth. I was amazed at how many of my students told me that I was the first of their teachers to even talk about the events in the classroom even two days after the event.

My experiences of September 11 reminded me of my duties as an educator--to value the student first, the learning process second, and the content lastly. The history classroom for me during and after September 11 became even more a flexible laboratory in which to study and comprehend the human condition, and I know that my students may remember it a bit as that as well.