9/11

Facebook is great - but sometimes, the words just want to come spilling out - way more than FB will allow.  So I'm blogging.

I've turned on the TV today to channel after channel.  Lots and lots of remembrances of 9/11.  I remember - like most people do, the horror, the disbelief and then anger.  I am a teacher, and the hardest part for me was to keep calm in front of my students, when all I wanted to do was scream and cry.  Everytime I left the classroom to walk the kids to another class, I would meet another collegue and just know by the looks on their faces, that the news had gotten worse. 

As the day wore on, I just couldn't let my 5th graders go home to an empty house, flip on the TV and see the horror without even being warned.  That was HARD!  I sat them all down, and told them briefly what was happening.  I knew that if I couldn't even grasp the enormity of the act, then how could they?  We were all numb when school let out.

The next day, the students were angry, confused, terrified and sad.  It was hard to even teach anything they would comprehend or even want to do.  Finally, one of the students asked if they could write letters - they weren't sure who they would be to, they just wanted to write letters about the towers falling, etc.  I took them immediately to the lab to write.  Considering most of them had never had any keyboarding, and it was hunt and peck, I was impressed by how quickly their letters began to form.  As I walked around, looking over their shoulders and reading their letters, it was heart breaking.  Many were questions of anguish - like:  Why do they hate us so much?  What did we ever do to them?  Will it happen again?  Will something like that happen where we live?  Why did they kill so many people.

Powerful words coming from 5th grade broken hearts!  So today, on the 10th anniversary, I remember not only the terrorist acts, but the heartbreak of my students as they grappled with terror in their previously fairly safe world.