Teaching 9/11: Don't mention the terrorists
We need "moral clarity" about 9/11, said New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch in a speech yesterday. "The men who attacked this city were terrorists. The men and women who ran into the towers to save innocent lives were heroes."
That works for me.
After 25 years, teachers are trying to explain what happened to students for whom it seems like ancient history.
A few miles from the Pentagon, which was hit by one of the hijacked planes, Fairfax County (Virginia) schools are telling teachers not to discuss the perpetrators, reports Asra Nomani for Fox News. Half of the six-page guide provides advice on creating "safe spaces for Muslim and Middle Eastern students," 15 percent is about the attacks and the rest "tip-toes around managing 'emotional responses' to the lesson." Military families are mentioned only three times and first responders only once, reports Nomani. There are 30 references to Islam and anti-Muslim bias.
As the hotel manager said when German tourists visited Fawlty Towers: "Don't mention the war."
It's a "vanilla" curriculum designed to offend no one, says retired Navy Vice Admiral Lou Crenshaw, who survived the Pentagon attack. He thinks students should know "this was an evil event" and think about what it takes to be a hero.
Crenshaw's wife sent him to work with a bag of carrots, he recalls. When he finally visited the ruins of his office, the carrots were still there. They were cooked.
Sari Beth Rosenberg "is entering her 25th year of teaching U.S. history in New York, at a high school near where the Twin Towers stood before the 9/11 terror attacks," writes Caitlynn Peetz Stephens in Education Week. Sept. 11, 2001 was supposed to be her first day of student teaching.
She uses 9/11 as a way to discuss "how historians do the work of studying history." At first, her students had memories of the day. They were "primary sources." Now, they look and videos and news reports. Even their parents may have been too young to remember 9/11.
She doesn't discuss her own emotions, Rosenberg says. "This is not some kind of therapy session for me."
Her advice to new teachers is to "give the students the primary sources to build their knowledge base, and provide them with the framework and critical-thinking skills they need to come to conclusions themselves."
It shouldn't be that hard for teachers to use clips from news broadcasts at the time, and written accounts in newspapers and magazines (from the time). Part of the horror that still resonates with me is remembering how people in NYC were sticking up notices ("Have you seen X ?"), because they had no idea whether their loved one had survived.
Fairfax and many others have literally just performed a Norm Macdonald joke.
Norm Macdonald delivered this line as a satirical joke on his podcast, Norm Macdonald Live, where he deadpanned: [1, 2]
Somewhere some people did something sometime.