Students see history as it unfolds

Sixteen years of teaching history changed drastically after terrorists crashed airplanes in New York City, Washington, D.C., and rural Pennsylvania last year, Chrissy Cooper said.

Ms. Cooper, a U.S. history and government teacher at Sequoyah Vocational Center, said that suddenly her students were living through a major historical event, and it helped them understand the true significance of the dates and events she had been teaching them all along.

“I’m a totally different teacher now,” Ms. Cooper said. “Students who were not interested in history love it now. It has real meaning for them because it’s happening as we’re teaching it.”

A year later, Ms. Cooper said she is taking the whole month of September to teach her students about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — the events that led up to it, those that have followed and what it all means. Students will have the chance to show their patriotism by wearing the colors of the U.S. flag, writing and discussing how the attacks affected them, she said.

“I don’t want to do any work on Sept. 11,” she said. “I just want it to be a day of reflection. We’re not going to make it a ‘pity party’ day. We want to look at what good came out of it.”

Senior Alexis Pritchett, 17, was in Ms. Cooper’s class last year and is her student aide this year. The attacks touched everyone, and caused them to seek answers to how and why such a thing could happen so close to home, she said.

“It was a very emotional time,” Ms. Pritchett said. “It was a very scary time, but it brought us all together. Everyone was willing to give a hand.”

All the students in Ms. Cooper’s class read the newspaper every day and made scrapbooks of important articles and developments that followed Sept. 11.

“They really got involved,” Ms. Pritchett said. “It became more than just Sept. 11. It became a question of, ‘Who are these people and why do they hate us?’”

Ms. Cooper said some students still are collecting clippings.

“They’ve made their own textbooks,” she said. “I’m using a lot of what we did last year to teach this year.”

E-mail Carolyne Park at cpark@timesfreepress.com

Photo by Carolyne Park Chrissy Cooper, a history teacher at Sequoyah Vocational Center, and senior Alexis Pritchett review the scrapbook Ms. Pritchett prepared as the class learned about Sept. 11.