Hamilton County teachers recount viewing 9/11 from the classroom
When planes struck the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, people across the United States kept their eyes glued to TV screens trying to make sense of what they were seeing. Twenty years later, Hamilton County teachers in classrooms locally and in other states remember navigating what they saw with their students.
Erika Perry had just begun her second year of teaching at Red Bank High School in 2001 and started hearing information about the first plane as her next class of the morning entered the classroom.
“They came in, and they just said ‘Ms. Perry, there’s something going on,’ and I was like, ‘what are you talking about?’” Perry said. “You know students will say stuff to kind of get the lesson going in a different direction, or just being kids, and I remember thinking ‘what, is there really something going on?’”
Perry said students told her they saw the news of an airplane crash from the TV in a science teacher’s room at the end of the hall. She then turned on the TV in her classroom, and students started discussing possibilities of what they were seeing when the second plane crashed.
“We all just kind of stared at the TV and just watched it for the next hour, just with everybody’s commentary and everything going on,” Perry said. “It’s really the rest of the day because we were trying to figure out what was going on, and different things are happening, and then they got more reports and it was a different day, definitely.”
Jeanette Omarkhail, president of Hamilton County Education Association, was teaching GED and college preparation classes to adult students in Massachusetts on that day. She said she and students periodically talked about the situation throughout the day, but tried to stay focused on work once they knew they were safe.
“We really just tried to focus on, let’s do our lessons, let’s do our work and take a break when we need to to
“We really just tried to focus on, let’s do our lessons, let’s do our work and take a break when we need to to look at it, to see if we’re good or not.”
– JEANETTE OMARKHAIL
look at it, to see if we’re good or not,” Omarkhail said. “Talking about the fact that the plane came from Boston, and we were about an hour south of there in Plymouth, so that was kind of shocking because they were able to really process that we were that close to the starting point of it.”
In 1989, Omarkhail said she was teaching in California when an earthquake struck. She said her experience talking to her third-grade students then helped her process what happened on 9/11 and keep her adult students focused on school.
“I compared to when I was in the earthquake in California, and you just want to sit and watch TV to see everything. You can get caught up in watching TV about it the whole time, and all the things that were happening.
We had to as a group, we just said ‘no we’re not going to do this, we’ll check in, but we’re going to try to really focus on what we need on school.’ We talked about it and then tried to separate from it, to do what we were there to do.”
Omarkhail said the event became a daily conversation afterward. Perry, who now teaches at a different school in Hamilton County, said things largely returned to normal at school within a week.
“The next year, our media class had put together, I can’t remember the song now, but it had all the different pictures, the different little bits of newscasts and stuff put together, and we had a remembrance every Sept. 11 after that and just kind of reminding everybody what happened,” Perry said.
“It kind of brought back the memories of us, going, ‘what in the world is going on’ but then also, we knew what happened and at that point, we knew all the people who had died, and so every year, it’s really sad what happened and all the lives that were lost.”