Madison Students Reflect on 9/11
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It is a history lesson that Don Roe, an American history teacher at Madison Academic Magnet High School, taught while it was in the making. “I was in the classroom when 9/11 happened. I remember explaining it to my students in real time and how their lives changed like that,” said Roe, with a snap of his fingers. That change was 10 years ago. Roe’s current students were in 1st and 2nd grade that September day. They were old enough to remember, but too young to comprehend. “I was in the 1st grade,” said Madison Academic junior, Morgan Dorsey. “We were having reading time or something. I just remember my teacher crying and we all didn’t know what happened really.” “We just heard it over the intercom and the teachers received an email or something,” said senior Madison Eggenberger. “My teacher was just really upset and I didn’t really understand what was going on.” “The teacher, she came in crying but she wouldn’t tell us what happened because she said we were too young to understand,” said sophomore Cardierre Miller. But a decade later, the tears of those they looked up to make a little more sense. “After watching it as an 11th grader, you understand it a lot more than when you were 6,” said Dorsey. Roe said there are some differences in teaching history now versus 10 years ago, but it is his job to help his students understand the events, impacts and world before the September 11th terrorist attacks. “These kids- again you’re right – they don’t know a world really before 9/11,” said Roe. “When you teach American history, or history of any kind, you have to look at it through the prism of what’s happening today. While we may not teach the specifics of what happened on that day, we spend a lot of time teaching how things in history relate to today, and how we live in a different world than we did 10 years ago when that happened.”
