September  11: Atrocity and the human spirit

This article originally appeared in the February 2003 Phi Delta Kappan.

Eighteen months or so before 9/11, I had begun taking graduate courses in educa­tion at night. After 25 years in the financial world, I was determined to become a social studies teacher before I turned 50. As a survivor of the attack on the World Trade Cen­ter who was about to enter the classroom as a teacher, I had many conflicting thoughts about the message I would share with my students. The need to put my thoughts on 9/11 into the form of a lesson kept tugging at me for more than a year. I tried many times, and just as many times I failed. For whatever reason, after a full year, the obsta­cles evaporated.

I am now a teacher and am preparing a social studies lesson on 9/11. I plan to discuss with students what I believe are some important and, frankly, heartening messages that don’t seem to get enough attention. In­evitably, we will have to discuss terrorism, but I will leave that lesson for another day.