Teaching 9/11 to a generation that didn't live through it: We just heard tales of it
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Set us as preferred Trent Nettles was a toddler on Sept.11, 2001.Now 27, Nettles is an 11th-grade Advanced Placement U.S.
history teacher — too young to remember the day but responsible for teaching it to students who weren’t yet born when it happened.His challenge was to make this lesson more than just another unit on the syllabus.Nettles told his students this week at Alliance Cindy & Bill Simon Technology High School in Watts, “I just remember, as a kid, that there was a lot of chaos.
That’s all.”Twenty-five years after the attacks, the anniversary has crossed a generational threshold.In a growing share of American classrooms, 9/11 is part of a past era, often taught by teachers with little more memory of it than the students in front of them.
Some do recall the morning but struggle to convey the magnitude of pain and fear to students for whom 9/11 is another date in a social studies course timeline.The shift begins in early childhood, when children may first hear the date amid adult conversation or catch a newsflash.
It runs through middle and high schools, where teachers debate how much of this history adolescent and teen students can absorb — and into college lecture halls, where professors who once taught 9/11 as a current event now teach it as decades-old history.1 2 1.
A military helicopter flies in front of the Pentagon Sept.14, 2001, in Arlington, Va., at the impact site where a hijacked airliner crashed into the building.
(Stephen J.Boitano / Getty Images) 2.
A student types responses during a lesson regarding the terrorist attacks of Sept.11 in Alliance Simon Technology High School on Sept.
9.(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times) And inside their homes, parents find ways to impart their own lessons, translating trauma into family history.For Heather Matula, an Atwater Village pa...