story5470.xml

story5470.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

I was in eighth grade and first period had just ended, so I went to my science teacher's classroom, which was also where the Spanish teacher from the high school taught my period two class. The science teacher had a TV on a wheeled stand with the news on when I came in.
I didn't fully comprehend what had happened until later that day. When I first saw the images on TV, it was a long-distance shot, so the towers looked to me like ordinary smokestacks. It didn't take long to figure out that the WTC towers had been hit, but even then, I didn't realize how big the towers were, or that so many people couldn't get out in the time they had before the towers fell. We watched the news for a while, and at some point another class came in and watched it with us, but then the principal told us to go back to a normal schedule.
Almost all of the television channels were running the same thing, so that you could channel-surf through the same coverage, the same images, for sometimes ten and fifteen channels at a time. Also my family had trouble getting our facts straight. We didn't know at first if Flight 93 had been shot down by a U.S. missile, and I remember hearing a report of a fire alarm or something going off at the White House.