story20399.xml

story20399.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2006-09-10

In order to save a teacher his position I agreed to be a daily substitute teacher for the school term. It was period two, and I was teaching about nine Chinese immigrants English as a Second Language 101. We practiced with: " Hello, what is your name?," "My name is..." Since it was such a beautiful, crystal clear day, I chose to teach the kids, "Today the weather is beautiful!" The kids were copying stuff from the blackboard as I stood by the window admiring the crystal clear blue sky.

I heard a loud noise, like a plane taking off and suddenly I saw a big jet that appeared to be headed straight at me. I recoiled. When I came to my senses, I thought that the plane was in trouble or something, as it was flying so low. Initially I thought it was making an emergancy landing, and I hoped it would attempt to land in the Hudson River in order to save lives. I tried hard to look inside the windows as it flew past the school building. It seemed very calm inside, I figured the passengers must be praying.

But the the plane picked up speed and steadied its course. It appeared that it would fly right into the twin Chatham Towers apartments at Confuscious Square down in Chinatown, but it stepped up its speed, and I thought the pilot regained control, and had to ascend in order to avoid the tall buildings, especially the World Trade Center building that it turned and flew towards. I crossed my fingers, hoping it would manage to fly between the buildings, but it it the North Tower directly.

It looked as though it isintegrated into glass fragments as it penetrated the building, but I saw it parked there, the tail black and sitting inside the black hole, then came the crash sound and I glanced over at my students. They were still copying from the board. I turned quickly back to the site and saw the fireball. I exclaimed, "Did you hear that?! Oh my goodness!, an American Airlines 757 just crashed into the World Trade Center!" the kids said "Whaa.." as they exited their seats to see what I was looking at. The black smoke began to pour out of the building. The Kids exclaimed, "WOW!" and were laughing. I retorted, "This is horrible. Do you realize hundreds of people have just been killed?!!"

I walked over to look out of the classroom door to tell an adult to inform the principal. An English teacher was coming down the hall. I exclaimed to her, "My God, Laura, an American Airlines 757 just flew into the World Trade Center!" She continued walking towards the library, holding her cup of coffee and not bothering to look. I heard later that she announced to the library that I must be on drugs, because of what I told her.

Since we had front row seats, and I knew this would be an historic event, I permitted all of my classes to view the disaster. Thank goodness we were too far away to see people dying,because it appeared so clearly I wondered if it could have been a computer game. It was the most memorable witnessing in my life and it has haunted me every day since.