It was intense, really intense. I was pretty young, 8 years old I think, so I was in the 3rd grade. I still remember a lot about that day and I don’t really remember much of anything before like 5th grade so to me that illustrates the impact it had on me. I could tell you a lot about that day: the shirt I was wearing, where I was sitting in my classroom, and what I was working on when the tv in my classroom was turned on the news and my teacher started crying. I think school had literally just started when my teacher found out, so around 9am in Arizona, which would mean we were a couple of hours behind if I remember correctly. I didn’t really understand what was going on because I was just a little 8 year-old but I knew something bad had happened because my teacher never really showed emotion until that day. Class stopped for a really long time, like full on stopped and everyone was just silent for what felt like hours. When we finally did start doing class work again it was definitely just to go through the motions and get through the day.

I remember going home and seeing the footage of the planes crashing into the towers still being shown on the news at 4pm local time and my parents sitting on the couch in stunned silence. Normally I’d come home and do my homework and then play a game or go outside to play but that didn’t happen that day. I did what little homework I had and then just kind of sat around waiting for my parents to go about their normal daily/nightly routines, which never happened.

I’m a high school science teacher now and this last school year I had only two students that were born before 9/11. Even then they were like two months old so they didn’t experience it but at least they knew what the significance of that day was. Some of the students didn’t even know what 9/11 actually was or why it’s a national headline every year which to me was honestly shocking and so saddening. My school is on a block schedule meaning the students have four classes per day, each 90 minutes long. Instead of talking about our actual lesson I spent the first 20-30 minutes of each class period talking about the significance of 9/11 and why it’s still a big deal to the nation as a whole. It was cool to be able to share my memory of that day, even though it’s not the nicest one to talk about. I know my students were grateful to hear about it from a real-life experience instead of the internet or a some other source. But it still made me really sad that so many of my students genuinely didn’t know anything about the attacks that day. Hopefully now they at least have a basic understanding of what happened and why we care so much still almost 20 years later.