story2370.xml

story2370.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

I remember walking down the science hall between second and third hours, when Kim ran to me she exclaimed that the Pentagon and the World Trade Center had been hit. I stepped in front of the door of one of the science rooms and saw on the television the two towers burning with all of the smoke billowing out over the city.

Immediately, I run to my Physics Honors class and stepped through the door and just froze. My teacher was just standing there looking at the screen. He simply mentioned that we wouldn't be doing distance v. time and velocity v. time graphs today. It just didn't seem important anymore.

After the bell rang for class to actually begin, we stood about half the hour not saying much. We slowly began asking who the prime suspects were and how each of us had heard of the attacks. During this time, I think they showed the first footage of the second tower being hit, which would have been about 10:30am. We simply died. Some people cried some more and others just turned away.

Eventually, we needed to switch classes again, but this time my AP Statistics teacher simply wouldn't let us watch more of the same footage. I can say that now, I think she made the right choice, but at the time, we couldn't understand how she could expect us to do something different. She understood that all we would do for the rest of the day would be watch the news, and she felt that listening to the rumors was a poor idea.

The day dragged on in much the same way. I didn't complete my homework and most of the classwork for the next day was postponed. It took a couple more days before we could do anything again in school.