New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
A teacher made speechless by a terror attack
At 8:48 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 20 years ago, I was a 56-year-old English teacher standing in my classroom doorway of Hartford High School in White River Junction, three doors from the main office
I was blissfully unaware that America was at that very moment being attacked with airplanes turned into suicide missiles at New York’s twin towers and minutes later the Pentagon.
But my students were about to bring me the unfathomable news.
I was watching a hallway full of students leaving a morning assembly and heading toward the first class of their day.
Students still used flipphones in 2001— which were only connected to the outside world through email and text messaging. Social media didn’t exist.
We had 465 students in Hartford High School, large for Vermont, which only has 500,000 residents in the entire state.
My classroom was directly across from the Athletic Office, which has a huge, glass wall facing the hallway, through which could be seen the only television in the school connected to cable TV.
Suddenly I heard gasps and, “Oh, my God” and “Did you see that?!” coming from the students gathering at the window. At first I tried to disperse the crowd until I saw the screen myself and a replay of the first plane hitting the tower. Then I melded into the crowd of gasping viewers myself.
“Was this a movie?” I thought at first. Then the reality of it started to set in.
The hall bells were ringing for class to begin and I tried to carry on as usual with my eleventh-graders.
But nothing was usual. I kept getting reports from students whose parents had texted them. “My mother says the tower fell.”
I announced “break time” a bit early so students could use the bathroom during the 89-minute-class but also so we all could join the crowd viewing the TV across the hall.
I was flabbergasted. The mother’s text message was true. The entire tower pancaked and disintegrated.
And before long the second tower fell, too. Too much was happening too fast.
It was the first and only time in my 25-year career as a Vermont English teacher that I was speechless. I’d collected three college degrees by then and prided myself on being able to respond articulately to any challenge.
But I had no words for this. I had no words the next week at the annual Parents’ Night when parents came to 10-minute short versions of each of their children’s classes.
The parents seemed moved that I was being honest with them. Perhaps they were relieved that even a teacher, too, was speechless and said so.
I never got over being speechless.
My first year as a teacher in 1986, I taught at Bethel Vermont’s Whitcomb High School, whose entire senior class had a total of 27 students.
In that year, January 28 was also a Tuesday, as 9/11 would be 15 years later.
In 1986, the Challenger spacecraft, minutes after launch, exploded in full view of the world. All the astronauts were killed, including nearby New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe, who had trained to be the first teacher in space.
It exploded at 11:38 a.m. but we would not find out until we watched the news when we got home that day.
The next day we shared the sadness together and I did have words that day. It was a tragic accident and my kids knew about accidents.
Sept. 11, 2001, was not an accident.
It was evil.
My kids did not know about evil then. And neither did their teacher.