"AMONG THE ASHES"
Senior Matthew Gubenko was at a babysitter’s house in New Hampshire when news came of the attacks on the Twin Towers.
“The babysitter came in, [and] she was very concerned and freaked out. She told us to get away from the TV, switched the channel, and [we saw] footage of trains [stopped] around the Twin Towers. My mom came around mid-afternoon ... to pick us up since everyone was like, ‘Get the kids home,’” he said. “That’s when they turned [the TV] on to the footage of the Twin Towers burning.”
Gubenko remembers the collective shock and confusion in the days that followed, along with a sense of patriotism. He recalls how people cheered when they saw planes flying again, no longer grounded.
Gubenko was 3 years old on 9/11. Although he remembers the event, many seniors do not. In fact, the seniors may well be the last class of students to remember the attacks at all; the incoming freshman class will be the last in which a majority of the students were alive at the time.
According to students and teachers, as the number of students with memories of 9/11 has dwindled, the attacks have faded from the curriculum and South’s collective conscience.
For sophomore Jackson Fyfe, though, the impact of 9/11 will never fade. Fyfe’s father was killed on one of the hijacked planes.
“It’s a pretty big part of our family … Every year we have a reunion and memorial,” he said. “Other people … pretty much don’t acknowledge the day — it’s just any other day for them ... It seems like a lot of people don’t understand how serious the event was.”
Emma Martignoni, a freshman, acknowledged that she feels a disconnect from the event because she does not remember it.
“I think that [when I learned about 9/11] I understood what happened, but not necessarily absorbed it. Kind of like when you watch a movie, and something bad happens, and you’re like ‘Oh that happened, but it’s not real,’” she said.
Though most of the student body has no memory of the event, many still see the importance of learning about the attacks and their repercussions. “[9/11 is] the biggest tragedy that’s occurred to the United States, [and] I would say in the modern era,” Gubenko said.
Senior Emma Talebzadeh, who has an Iranian background, said that educating students could be an opportunity to dispel stereotypes. “I think it’s really important to know that yes, people from the Middle East were behind what happened — but they don’t represent an entire region,” she said.
9/11 can also serve as a foreign policy lesson, according to history teacher Faye Cassell.
“In order to understand the political climate and the foreign policy decisions that the United States has made in the last decade-and-a-half, you have to understand 9/11,” she said. “In terms of the way we interact with the Middle East and the way we interact with the rest of the world — how we have presented ourselves, where we have invested time, energy, money, resources — all of that has been a direct result of 9/11.”
Junior Ruslan Crosby said education can ensure that a tragedy of 9/11’s magnitude does not happen again.
Freshman Tommy Cable, who said that it is important to honor the anniversary of 9/11, agreed. “It’s a negative day, and a negative thing as a whole, but I guess we can build from it as a country,” he said.
But with each passing anniversary, 9/11 inevitably slips from its position of visceral prominence.
Jonathan Winkler, a seventh grade teacher at Brown, was at ground zero just a few days after the attacks, preparing to go overseas for military duty. Winkler said he was able to take pictures of the debris that traveled all around the city and collect some rocks from the fires in the buildings, which he has incorporated into a lesson he teaches on the anniversary.
According to Winkler, his connection to 9/11 means that his lesson is grounded in something personal, even though the way he teaches it has evolved.
The lesson began as an open discussion with his students about the trauma of the experience, before becoming a discussion of current events and eventually, after around a decade, a history lesson. “Around that time I made the lessons a little bit shorter [because] the kids were a little bit more disconnected,” he said.
For Winkler, 9/11 has had a lasting emotional impact. “I try to include my own personal story as well as the history of what happened on that day,” he said. “It’s kind of a mix of current events and history.”
But the same is not true for most students, of whom the oldest have only a hazy recollection of the event, if any.
“We’re now almost 15 years away from the event. It almost feels as though it’s now become just another event in the past for students; we’re far enough away that students don’t feel an emotional impact,” Cassell said. “Because it has no emotional resonance with students, I think it feels strange to try to memorialize it with them ... So I sort of treat it as almost any other event that we’ve had in the past now.”
“In a lot of ways, people don’t really want to talk about it anymore because it was such a sad and traumatic event,” senior Emily Visco said. She recalled the discussion she had in class her sophomore year. “We were looking at revolutions and a lot of different wars … so 9/11 came up more. That year on 9/11, on the actual day, we spent a lot of time talking about it,” she said.
Gubenko said he has had a different experience at South. While Winkler teaches his middle school students about the event every year, Gubenko said that this is not the norm in high school.
“Even in history class, like AP U.S. History, you’d think that there would be a discussion about this changing political event that has occurred in the 21st century to America, but we didn’t talk about it all,” he said. “I haven’t heard an actual history teacher teach about 9/11 or inform people about what actually happened. I had to go out there and watch documentaries, read books, find out what actually occurred on my own.”
Teachers are actually encouraged to work 9/11 into the curriculum, according to Principal Joel Stembridge, who has been at South for six years, though there is no standard lesson.
“We don’t have a set lesson plan because we think it’s more authentic to have teachers figure out a way to work it into their current lesson,” he said. “There’s a lot of parallels and similarities that are echoes of themes in other parts of history. It’s not too difficult to tie that into something else and I think our teachers do a good job at that.”
Most students gain an understanding of 9/11 in middle school anyway, Stembridge said.
Yet the tragedy is difficult for anyone to discuss, Gubenko said, and some teachers may choose not to do so to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.
Martignoni agreed. “Bad things happen. That’s just the reality, and people tend to avoid talking about things that other people don’t want to hear,” she said.
The timing of the event — which overlaps with the beginning of the school year — also poses a challenge for teachers building lesson plans, Winkler said.
Junior Harir Zeidi said her elementary and middle schools took time to remember 9/11, but that changed as time went on. Cable said that in his last years of middle school, a 30-second moment of silence was all that remained to memorialize the day.
South, on the other hand, does not observe a moment of silence.
“I can’t really understand why we wouldn’t do it - it’s a moment of silence,” Gubenko said. “The rest of the world is remembering it.”
Stembridge, though, said that there is a reason for this. North’s former principal Jen Price lost family members on 9/11, and to respect Price and her family, South decided to honor 9/11 the same way as North in future years. Eventually, North decided to stop holding a moment of silence. “There are other days in our history that we could also have a moment of silence for but are now long past. I think everyone would agree that eventually you stop doing a moment of silence for something,” Stembridge said. “I think the thing we disagree on is when.”
Despite the challenges, some teachers and students said that it is critical to continue to find ways to remember and learn from 9/11.
A good option would be to have a school-wide assembly on the anniversary of 9/11, Zeidi said. Visco agreed, but added that student need to be “educated every year about it, not only on the date, but [in] the curriculum.”
Winkler has tried to be creative while incorporating 9/11 into the curriculum. In 2012, just months before the Boston Marathon bombings, he had his students spend the day writing letters to Newton’s first responders, adding a human element to the typically impersonal anniversary.
“There were so many firefighters who rushed into the World Trade Center, … so many police officers that went to help evacuate people and they completely risked their own lives for the safety of [others],” he said.
Teaching 9/11, he said, can be a way to teach about community and compassion in the wake of tragedy.
“One of the best lessons that came out of 9/11 was how it brought everyone together. … We really come together during crisis, and I think we should find ways of doing that everyday,” Winkler said. “That’s where I’d like to see [teaching 9/11] go — acknowledging the details but keep the focus on how people reacted and what they did.”
Gubenko said he has had a different experience at South. While Winkler teaches his middle school students about the event every year, Gubenko said that this is not the norm in high school.
“Even in history class, like AP U.S. History, you’d think that there would be a discussion about this changing political event that has occurred in the 21st century to America, but we didn’t talk about it at all,” he said. “I haven’t heard an actual history teacher teach about 9/11 or inform people about what actually happened. I had to go out there and watch documentaries, read books, find out what actually occurred on my own.”
But in fact, teachers are encouraged to work 9/11 into the curriculum, according to Principal Joel Stembridge, though there is no standard lesson.
“We don’t have a set lesson plan because we think it’s more authentic to have teachers figure out a way to work it into their current lesson,” he said. “There’s a lot of parallels and similarities that are echoes of themes in other parts of history. It’s not too difficult to tie that into something else, and I think our teachers do a good job at that.”
Stembridge added that many elementary and middle schools teach about 9/11, so most students are aware of the day’s significance by the time they enter high school.
Yet the tragedy is difficult for anyone to discuss, Gubenko said, and some teachers may choose not to do so to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.
Martignoni agreed. “Bad things happen. That’s just the reality, and people tend to avoid talking about things that other people don’t want to hear,” she said.
The timing of the event — which overlaps with the beginning of the school year — also poses a challenge for teachers building lesson plans, Winkler added.
Junior Harir Zeidi said her elementary and middle schools took time to remember 9/11, but that changed as time went on. Cable said that in his last years of middle school, a 30-second moment of silence was all that remained to memorialize the day.
South, on the other hand, does not observe a moment of silence.
“I can’t really understand why we wouldn’t do it — it’s a moment of silence,” Gubenko said. “The rest of the world is remembering it.”
Stembridge, however, said that there is a reason for the lack of school-wide commemoration. North’s former principal Jen Price lost family members on 9/11, and to respect Price and her family, South decided to honor 9/11 the same way as North did in future years. Eventually, North stopped holding a moment of silence.
“There are other days in our history that we could also have a moment of silence for, but are now long past. I think everyone would agree that eventually you stop doing a moment of silence for something,” Stembridge said. “I think the thing we disagree on is when.”
Despite the challenges, some said it is critical to continue to find ways to remember and learn from 9/11.
A good option would be to have a school-wide assembly on the anniversary of 9/11, Zeidi said. Visco agreed, but added that students need to be “educated every year about it, not only on the date, but [in] the curriculum.”
Winkler has tried to be creative while incorporating 9/11 into the curriculum. In 2012, just months before the Boston Marathon bombings, he had his students spend the day writing letters to Newton’s first responders, adding a human element to the typically impersonal anniversary.
“There were so many firefighters who rushed into the World Trade Center … so many police officers that went to help evacuate people and they completely risked their own lives for the safety of [others],” he said.
Teaching 9/11, he said, can be a way to teach about community and compassion in the wake of tragedy.
“One of the best lessons that came out of 9/11 was how it brought everyone together … We really come together during crisis, and I think we should find ways of doing that every day,” Winkler said. “That’s where I’d like to see [teaching 9/11] go — acknowledging the details but keep the focus on how people reacted and what they did.”
“The babysitter came in, [and] she was very concerned and freaked out. She told us to get away from the TV, switched the channel, and [we saw] footage of trains [stopped] around the Twin Towers. My mom came around mid-afternoon ... to pick us up since everyone was like, ‘Get the kids home,’” he said. “That’s when they turned [the TV] on to the footage of the Twin Towers burning.”
Gubenko remembers the collective shock and confusion in the days that followed, along with a sense of patriotism. He recalls how people cheered when they saw planes flying again, no longer grounded.
Gubenko was 3 years old on 9/11. Although he remembers the event, many seniors do not. In fact, the seniors may well be the last class of students to remember the attacks at all; the incoming freshman class will be the last in which a majority of the students were alive at the time.
According to students and teachers, as the number of students with memories of 9/11 has dwindled, the attacks have faded from the curriculum and South’s collective conscience.
For sophomore Jackson Fyfe, though, the impact of 9/11 will never fade. Fyfe’s father was killed on one of the hijacked planes.
“It’s a pretty big part of our family … Every year we have a reunion and memorial,” he said. “Other people … pretty much don’t acknowledge the day — it’s just any other day for them ... It seems like a lot of people don’t understand how serious the event was.”
Emma Martignoni, a freshman, acknowledged that she feels a disconnect from the event because she does not remember it.
“I think that [when I learned about 9/11] I understood what happened, but not necessarily absorbed it. Kind of like when you watch a movie, and something bad happens, and you’re like ‘Oh that happened, but it’s not real,’” she said.
Though most of the student body has no memory of the event, many still see the importance of learning about the attacks and their repercussions. “[9/11 is] the biggest tragedy that’s occurred to the United States, [and] I would say in the modern era,” Gubenko said.
Senior Emma Talebzadeh, who has an Iranian background, said that educating students could be an opportunity to dispel stereotypes. “I think it’s really important to know that yes, people from the Middle East were behind what happened — but they don’t represent an entire region,” she said.
9/11 can also serve as a foreign policy lesson, according to history teacher Faye Cassell.
“In order to understand the political climate and the foreign policy decisions that the United States has made in the last decade-and-a-half, you have to understand 9/11,” she said. “In terms of the way we interact with the Middle East and the way we interact with the rest of the world — how we have presented ourselves, where we have invested time, energy, money, resources — all of that has been a direct result of 9/11.”
Junior Ruslan Crosby said education can ensure that a tragedy of 9/11’s magnitude does not happen again.
Freshman Tommy Cable, who said that it is important to honor the anniversary of 9/11, agreed. “It’s a negative day, and a negative thing as a whole, but I guess we can build from it as a country,” he said.
But with each passing anniversary, 9/11 inevitably slips from its position of visceral prominence.
Jonathan Winkler, a seventh grade teacher at Brown, was at ground zero just a few days after the attacks, preparing to go overseas for military duty. Winkler said he was able to take pictures of the debris that traveled all around the city and collect some rocks from the fires in the buildings, which he has incorporated into a lesson he teaches on the anniversary.
According to Winkler, his connection to 9/11 means that his lesson is grounded in something personal, even though the way he teaches it has evolved.
The lesson began as an open discussion with his students about the trauma of the experience, before becoming a discussion of current events and eventually, after around a decade, a history lesson. “Around that time I made the lessons a little bit shorter [because] the kids were a little bit more disconnected,” he said.
For Winkler, 9/11 has had a lasting emotional impact. “I try to include my own personal story as well as the history of what happened on that day,” he said. “It’s kind of a mix of current events and history.”
But the same is not true for most students, of whom the oldest have only a hazy recollection of the event, if any.
“We’re now almost 15 years away from the event. It almost feels as though it’s now become just another event in the past for students; we’re far enough away that students don’t feel an emotional impact,” Cassell said. “Because it has no emotional resonance with students, I think it feels strange to try to memorialize it with them ... So I sort of treat it as almost any other event that we’ve had in the past now.”
“In a lot of ways, people don’t really want to talk about it anymore because it was such a sad and traumatic event,” senior Emily Visco said. She recalled the discussion she had in class her sophomore year. “We were looking at revolutions and a lot of different wars … so 9/11 came up more. That year on 9/11, on the actual day, we spent a lot of time talking about it,” she said.
Gubenko said he has had a different experience at South. While Winkler teaches his middle school students about the event every year, Gubenko said that this is not the norm in high school.
“Even in history class, like AP U.S. History, you’d think that there would be a discussion about this changing political event that has occurred in the 21st century to America, but we didn’t talk about it all,” he said. “I haven’t heard an actual history teacher teach about 9/11 or inform people about what actually happened. I had to go out there and watch documentaries, read books, find out what actually occurred on my own.”
Teachers are actually encouraged to work 9/11 into the curriculum, according to Principal Joel Stembridge, who has been at South for six years, though there is no standard lesson.
“We don’t have a set lesson plan because we think it’s more authentic to have teachers figure out a way to work it into their current lesson,” he said. “There’s a lot of parallels and similarities that are echoes of themes in other parts of history. It’s not too difficult to tie that into something else and I think our teachers do a good job at that.”
Most students gain an understanding of 9/11 in middle school anyway, Stembridge said.
Yet the tragedy is difficult for anyone to discuss, Gubenko said, and some teachers may choose not to do so to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.
Martignoni agreed. “Bad things happen. That’s just the reality, and people tend to avoid talking about things that other people don’t want to hear,” she said.
The timing of the event — which overlaps with the beginning of the school year — also poses a challenge for teachers building lesson plans, Winkler said.
Junior Harir Zeidi said her elementary and middle schools took time to remember 9/11, but that changed as time went on. Cable said that in his last years of middle school, a 30-second moment of silence was all that remained to memorialize the day.
South, on the other hand, does not observe a moment of silence.
“I can’t really understand why we wouldn’t do it - it’s a moment of silence,” Gubenko said. “The rest of the world is remembering it.”
Stembridge, though, said that there is a reason for this. North’s former principal Jen Price lost family members on 9/11, and to respect Price and her family, South decided to honor 9/11 the same way as North in future years. Eventually, North decided to stop holding a moment of silence. “There are other days in our history that we could also have a moment of silence for but are now long past. I think everyone would agree that eventually you stop doing a moment of silence for something,” Stembridge said. “I think the thing we disagree on is when.”
Despite the challenges, some teachers and students said that it is critical to continue to find ways to remember and learn from 9/11.
A good option would be to have a school-wide assembly on the anniversary of 9/11, Zeidi said. Visco agreed, but added that student need to be “educated every year about it, not only on the date, but [in] the curriculum.”
Winkler has tried to be creative while incorporating 9/11 into the curriculum. In 2012, just months before the Boston Marathon bombings, he had his students spend the day writing letters to Newton’s first responders, adding a human element to the typically impersonal anniversary.
“There were so many firefighters who rushed into the World Trade Center, … so many police officers that went to help evacuate people and they completely risked their own lives for the safety of [others],” he said.
Teaching 9/11, he said, can be a way to teach about community and compassion in the wake of tragedy.
“One of the best lessons that came out of 9/11 was how it brought everyone together. … We really come together during crisis, and I think we should find ways of doing that everyday,” Winkler said. “That’s where I’d like to see [teaching 9/11] go — acknowledging the details but keep the focus on how people reacted and what they did.”
Gubenko said he has had a different experience at South. While Winkler teaches his middle school students about the event every year, Gubenko said that this is not the norm in high school.
“Even in history class, like AP U.S. History, you’d think that there would be a discussion about this changing political event that has occurred in the 21st century to America, but we didn’t talk about it at all,” he said. “I haven’t heard an actual history teacher teach about 9/11 or inform people about what actually happened. I had to go out there and watch documentaries, read books, find out what actually occurred on my own.”
But in fact, teachers are encouraged to work 9/11 into the curriculum, according to Principal Joel Stembridge, though there is no standard lesson.
“We don’t have a set lesson plan because we think it’s more authentic to have teachers figure out a way to work it into their current lesson,” he said. “There’s a lot of parallels and similarities that are echoes of themes in other parts of history. It’s not too difficult to tie that into something else, and I think our teachers do a good job at that.”
Stembridge added that many elementary and middle schools teach about 9/11, so most students are aware of the day’s significance by the time they enter high school.
Yet the tragedy is difficult for anyone to discuss, Gubenko said, and some teachers may choose not to do so to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.
Martignoni agreed. “Bad things happen. That’s just the reality, and people tend to avoid talking about things that other people don’t want to hear,” she said.
The timing of the event — which overlaps with the beginning of the school year — also poses a challenge for teachers building lesson plans, Winkler added.
Junior Harir Zeidi said her elementary and middle schools took time to remember 9/11, but that changed as time went on. Cable said that in his last years of middle school, a 30-second moment of silence was all that remained to memorialize the day.
South, on the other hand, does not observe a moment of silence.
“I can’t really understand why we wouldn’t do it — it’s a moment of silence,” Gubenko said. “The rest of the world is remembering it.”
Stembridge, however, said that there is a reason for the lack of school-wide commemoration. North’s former principal Jen Price lost family members on 9/11, and to respect Price and her family, South decided to honor 9/11 the same way as North did in future years. Eventually, North stopped holding a moment of silence.
“There are other days in our history that we could also have a moment of silence for, but are now long past. I think everyone would agree that eventually you stop doing a moment of silence for something,” Stembridge said. “I think the thing we disagree on is when.”
Despite the challenges, some said it is critical to continue to find ways to remember and learn from 9/11.
A good option would be to have a school-wide assembly on the anniversary of 9/11, Zeidi said. Visco agreed, but added that students need to be “educated every year about it, not only on the date, but [in] the curriculum.”
Winkler has tried to be creative while incorporating 9/11 into the curriculum. In 2012, just months before the Boston Marathon bombings, he had his students spend the day writing letters to Newton’s first responders, adding a human element to the typically impersonal anniversary.
“There were so many firefighters who rushed into the World Trade Center … so many police officers that went to help evacuate people and they completely risked their own lives for the safety of [others],” he said.
Teaching 9/11, he said, can be a way to teach about community and compassion in the wake of tragedy.
“One of the best lessons that came out of 9/11 was how it brought everyone together … We really come together during crisis, and I think we should find ways of doing that every day,” Winkler said. “That’s where I’d like to see [teaching 9/11] go — acknowledging the details but keep the focus on how people reacted and what they did.”