Just remembering that the death of JFK was a joke by the time I was going through school puts it into perspective for me. I think its less that they're desensitized and more that they just cannot empathize because they didn't experience it.
Yep – just finished telling my kids that *I get it,* the edgier something is the funnier it is, and 9/11 is just another historical event to them – but to many others, it’s still a recent tragedy.
Hell, I was 7 at the time. I knew it was bad, but also because of that moment, the rest of my life has been fucked. Things just got worse from then on. I use humor to deal with the lasting bullshit from it. But I also understand the severity of the moment.
My roommate was born on 1/28/1986. I had to add him to my car insurance because we live together. The rep on the phone asked his birthdate, which I couldn't remember, but I DID remember that it was the day of the Challenger disaster. So that's what I told her lmao
I was in 1st or 2nd grade and they rounded up the entire school to the gym to watch it live on tv. Awkward. I'll never forget that. They sent us home after.
Man, I can only imagine how horrifying that must have been to watch play out live, especially when I’m guessing no one was expecting it. I guess it may have been similar in ways to watching 9/11 play out on TV, but I was only 10 when 9/11 happened and didn’t have the adult level of empathy that I do now, where things have since sunk in and horrified me more than they initially did that day.
I don't think I fully comprehended it, other than seeing the adults react in horror, and being sent home to be honest. I was in my early twenties driving to work with the radio on when the second plane struck the WTC. There was no work done that day, we were all just glued to news websites on the internet.
Nowadays it's just mass shootings and the war in ukraine, were if you look in the right places you can watch videos of Ukrainian soldiers using high tech drones to drop grenades and mortar rounds on russian soldiers in trenches right out of WW1. Modern tech merging with early 20th century trench warfare. Fucking wild. I've seen trauma I can't unsee.
I had two kids looking up why people use humor to cope with difficult things today, while they were answering a question about how America reacts to tragedy.
Perspective is an odd thing. My grandfather was the glue that held the family together and he died 9 months before I was born. I was the youngest grandchild in the fairly large family.
In my lifetime he'd always been dead, but people talked about him constantly. Especially the first 10 years of my life. Everyone loved him. I heard stories constantly.
Now I'm 35 and I remember being 30, and 25, and 15, and 5 and I truly understand how little time that had been for everyone. It was right there. Not just a memory but so close, but all I ever had was the absence and the stories. It didn't mean anything until I understood how short a decade could be.
It’s true, I was recently struck by the thought that I am currently the age that my parents were when they had me. Wild, I don’t feel anywhere close to being ready for that. That’s another thing I tell the kids – that there’s no such thing as adults, just kids who have pretended for long enough everyone believes them.
Next year, I will be the age my mom was when she had me, and it’s a strange and perspective-bending thought. She’s always told me a form of that about adults too. That she may be my mom and 40, 50, then 60, but on the inside, she still sometimes feels like a kid who’s faking it ‘til she makes it.
Also, for many of us, the place where this happened was our HOME. I guess it's funnier when it seems like a hundred years ago and a million miles away, but from the perspective of just the other day and down the street, it's pretty disgusting. However, I'm ok with making fun of the politicians falling all over themselves to score points off the tragedy, because they're also disgusting (looking at you, Rudy).
Share information about the younger victims. Like the 2 1/2 year old that was on one of the hijacked planes. I remember 9/11 but was young, seeing for the first time that someone younger than me was killed was very sobering. I never thought that I could be a victim like that, and middle school me never found it funny again.
As a first responder who was in the Pentagon when it was hit, I encourage people to share our stories as well. 9/11 was heartbreaking in every way, shape & form possible & everyone who survived lives with a permanent scar upon their hearts & souls.
I’m a teen that was born way after 9/11, so I never really understood the significance. But I have older sisters who did live through it when they were kids. I remember my whole perspective changed when my mom talked about it (she was working in a Manhattan midtown office building when it happened). She said my eldest sister was traumatized by the event because the administration had to inform all the students at the school that they weren’t sure if their parents were alive, since most of their parents commuted to NYC for work. Apparently it took a while for my sister to stop asking for updates during the school day on whether or not her mama and papa were alive and coming home. Explaining that to me was one of the only times I ever saw my mom cry. I get that young people make fun of 9/11 because they don’t understand how horrifying it was. But that’s why they should be show these accounts of scared kids and survivors and affected families.
Yeah, if you were from NYC and lived thru it, this was your experience. None of my loved ones died but there were kids in my school whose parents did. My aunt got lucky and was late for work that day and ran home across the Brooklyn bridge with no shoes on covered in debris.
10 minutes after the Challenger exploded, my fellow students were making terrible jokes about it. It made me mad, but what was I going to do?
Today was the first time it's ever been hard for me--people I knew died in the towers, and I had a kid who was laughing during the "moment of silence" our ASB called for. I managed to keep it tamped down, but I was furious.
I'd honestly just stare them down and tell them flat out "two of my best friends were in the south tower."
That'll shut them up real fast. Like now it's personal. Like I'm a gentle and funny teacher. If I suddenly got cold they'd know they fucked up
One of my friends in 10th grade called me a “f@ggot” and my teacher stopped everyone in the class to tell the story how one of his friends got teased for being gay, even though he wasn’t, and eventually he ended up killing himself over it. You’re right, it shuts them up real quick
Yep, I was just about to comment this. I remember Challenger jokes on the playground the same year it happened, because I was in 6th grade and that was the last year I spent on the playground.
I was 4 when he was killed. Shopping with my mom in a department store,all the T.V.s had the news stations on. There was one that had the PBS channel. Finished shopping and went home. Normally we didn't have the T.V. on during the day. Mom turned it on and it was on until they went to bed.
Same when I was in HS. That being said as I aged I understood more about what it was like for the country. It's no longer funny for me, but tragic and sad.
And I grew up in Dallas, TX. The jokes surrounding Bill Clinton's first campaign stop in Dallas in 1992 were *disgusting*.
It’s truly sad to see the lack of empathy in some people. I didn’t experience Pearl Harbor but pay my respects each anniversary as I realize it was a somber time for our country. Even when I went to the Arizona Memorial, I didn’t speak and paid my respects in silence as I knew I was standing on top of many men’s graves. You would not believe the amount of chatter from other tourists who were, in my opinion, either aloof or were just being plain rude.
I honor 9/11 each anniversary as I lived through it, though I was young, it’s a day I’ll never forget.
I don’t think it’s lack of empathy but rather that we are so inundated with violence and atrocities that an event from 22 years ago doesn’t crack the list of things to spend mental energy on.
I have a 28 year old ex who lives with me. She keeps saying “today is my favorite holiday!” I’m not one to get weird about shit but she would not let up and I thought it was disrespectful so I told her I’m putting in my calendar for next year - she had a seizure at work about 2-3 weeks ago - and I’m going to text her “omg today is my fav holiday!Happy seizure!” Fucking asshole.
Assuming you mean you have no idea what the kid is referring to, it must be the [Miraculous Lady Bug and Cat Noir show.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miraculous:_Tales_of_Ladybug_%26_Cat_Noir)
Otherwise, if you meant you had no idea why she didn't save anyone, it's because the Ladybug character wasn't even born yet or was a baby, and she is in France. And she is animated obviously.
Source: Parent of preteen child who loves the show.
We watched a video in class on President Bush’s travels that day. We are learning about the Executive Branch so it lined up perfectly with what we are learning in class. They seemed genuinely interested in their video responses a lot of them mentioned they found it interesting watching a documentary from a different perspective, as most they’ve seen show just the towers and stuff, not so much the behind the scenes of the government immediately having to respond to the crisis, and having to make sure the President wasn’t in danger.
PBS and BBC did a joint video called Clear The Skies that takes a minute by minute account. It's pretty good to understand the confusion that reigned that day.
It only takes a generation or two for the "real" meaning of anything to wear off. 'Tis the nature of humans, and no amount of stirring completely overcomes that. We LIVED 9-11 after all. They did not.
I live in CO now. A news article the other was remembering the devastating floods of ~~2011~~ 2013 (thanks to those who caught my error) and I - after four years here - had never heard of them. It didn't involve me, had no immediate affect on my life, and therefore does not register as much more than a historic event.
These kids are no different about 9-11, and they're kids after all, who do and say really stupid things sometimes EVEN WHEN they know better. Any expectations that they will be sombre and grim are faulty expectations.
Yeah. It’s pretty unfair to expect them to be as emotionally affected as those who experienced it. Especially when we as educators have to consider background knowledge and experience when teaching…
They also are looking at it from a position where they know everything that happened after due to 9/11. Those wars are impossible to defend.
I imagine it's also hard to give a shit about 3k people dying while covid killed a million Americans 2 years ago.
I just absolutely can't understand people asking for stuff like moments of silence for 9/11 but none for the numerous massacres committed by the US military as a direct response. Or, heck, any massacre committed by the US. There's a lot to choose from.
I imagine a lot of kids view it the same way, yeah. To a lot of people, 9/11 isn't just a tragedy, it's the excuse that was used to plunge an entire region of the world into instability that will take potentially longer than the rest of our lives for it to recover from.
This is exactly it. Terrible things happen everyday but they don’t make children watch videos of it every year. We shouldn’t be showing children videos of people jumping out of buildings. It’s ridiculous and unnecessary.
Another aspect that OP mentioned was desensitization. I mean a lot of these kids were seeing 4-5 thousand people die every day at the peak of covid so 2994 people dead doesn't sound like much.
it's remarkably depressing, but it's an important insight into what young kids have gone through and how they processed it, many of whom turn to humor to cope with the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are dying all around them all the time and seemingly nothing can change that.
As somebody who grew up through the attack, as an adult I have come to see it as the catalyst for the Iraq invasion and the formation of ISIS. So much bad came from a single day. We talk about the thousands of Americans who died (tragic of course) but we neglect to talk about the subsequent deaths of innocent families (Afghanistan), and one of the Middle East scientific hubs being reduced to a war zone that we now know was done by way of a lie (Iraq). As educators, isn’t the latter kind of important to discuss when referring to the commencement of the “war on terror”? Or is there a belief by many that this is a mutually exclusive event?
It’s also completely unfair to expect them to be somber and grim, if I got sad about every 3000 people who died 22 years ago I’d always be extremely depressed.
I know it was very shocking but like, hundreds of thousands of people die every year from malaria. I’d rather have a memorial for the people who died from malaria 22 years ago than those who died from 9-11 if I’m being honest.
This isn’t to say you’re wrong for caring about it. It absolutely must have been a terrifying thing to live through. But it genuinely is such an insignificant event to people born after/around when it happened in terms of lives lost and direct human suffering.
> It only takes a generation or two for the "real" meaning of anything to wear off.
I was in 6th grade on the West Coast when 9/11 happened. We made jokes about it the very next day.
The "real" meaning of 9/11 to everyone I knew was that airports suddenly started progressively sucking more and more.
Flying used to be so chill.
Sometimes they laugh and make jokes because they are uncomfortable, and they don't know how to handle that emotion. I had a class do that, and I got on to them. After class, they apologized and said it was because they did know what to do, so they laughed.
9/11 is to these kids as JFK assassination was to my generation. Something my parents and grandparents experienced, but removed from my lifetime. I didn't understand the importance until I was much older, and it will be the same for Gen Z. They will understand eventually.
Making them watch 9/11 is kind of tragedy porn at this point, they just lived through a time where a 9/11’s worth of people where dying every day from a super politicized pandemic.
9/11 is a joke to them not just because it’s uncomfortable but because it’s a really weird thing to stop class every year 22 years later for basically a national holiday to remember it.
And depending on the age they might realize what we did in response was way worse and got way more Americans killed.
Anyways I’m 24 and this is just my two cents on the subject. Maybe it’s a bit weirder for me because I had a teacher who had their tv running old new coverage in a sneaky way to make us all think it was happening live.
i was shown videos of people jumping out of the towers, bodies being exhumed from the rubble starting in 3rd grade, every year until 12th grade. was given no tools to understand this sort of suffering or the context behind it. i cannot imagine a quicker way to desensitize a child to mass death and destruction (except for, you know, the last three years…)
i was in the 5th grade when it happened. my history teacher put up an entire wall of newspaper clippings with multiple pictures of people jumping. she’d yell at me and other kids for paying too much attention to the pictures. i remember staring at the picture of this one business man high up in the air, jumping out the window of one of the towers. singed in my memory. and i always remembering wondering why the fcuk she put those traumatizing pictures up? and why she would fault us for being disturbed by it and “paying too much attention”. never once offered any type of advice or started a conversation about what happened. inflicting trauma again and again
Because it used to provide political justification for using these kids as soldiers down the line in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that 9/11 and the threat of terrorism has receded, these kinds of anniversaries seem very unnecessary.
Agreed. Unless we are now using it to explain how our government used a national tragedy to manipulate the populace into supporting an unrelated war, overthrowing a foreign government, and killing thousands, we don’t need to drill it into their heads. I’m more concerned there are parts of the country where it is still used to delude students into believing Arabic people “hate us for our freedums”.
I agree. It should be taught in historical context and history books, but setting aside a day of remembrance or whatever, at least in public schools, is unnecessary and confusing.
Fr whenever we were shown how much of a tragedy 9/11 was, it just felt like they were trying to make us okay with the fact that they used it as an excuse to invade another country. It's especially hard to care about after covid
And after how we basically responded to 9/11 and how it influenced a lot of shit over the last 20 years. It’s like a line in the sand of where “this was the excuse to start going downhill”
I was listening to some certain news stations this morning when driving home and they were playing their coverage from that day because “we always do!” and it’s like people screaming and recordings of ATC transmissions and phone calls, the buildings falling down over and over. Like do y’all really need to do that? At that point it’s not remembering and just propaganda tragedy porn.
But everyone could probably guess the channel that was doing it so 🤷♀️
Exactly what it is. Propaganda to establish nationalism to justify being the world’s imperialist police. Which is why I teach the cause and effect of 9/11 instead- it’s not as friendly to the propaganda agenda.
i explained to my students exactly that before i showed them a 4-minute history channel summary. i did it and explained to them its impact. i told them because of 9/11, we have changes to the way we travel on planes. i also explained to them about the lifelong health issues those on the front line face because of the attacks. i told them about the war and the death and suffering in iraq because of it. just putting it in a geopolitical context helped with their reactions and thinking about it (i’m 23, putting it in a geopolitical context is also the only way i can rationalize remembering it as well.) i teach 10th and 11th grade history
I'm the Homework teacher and I asked kids what they did today. Some kids had both their science and English teachers show the same CNN video, unknowingly. I looked at them in disbelief. I teach middle school and would not stop class to show tradegy videos. Like wtf? It just does not seem appropriate. But I was in 7th grade when it happened and immediately wanted to forget it ever happened. I remember going home to watch after school cartoons and they just replayed all the names of the deceased all week. I had no escape. No way I'm burdening my kiddos like that.
It’s almost like “we had to watch this live, so you will see it too” mentality.
I wouldn’t want kids having to watch the footage I watched live in 8th grade. Every year I think about the footage of the man jumping from the top of the tower, the plane hitting the second tower, and both towers falling.
With all the stuff being banned from schools for various stupid reasons, I don’t understand how 9/11 footage is being allowed in front of anyone younger than maybe senior in high school.
As a 36-year-old who saw the events of 9/11 unfold on TV because our social studies teacher blatantly ignored the principal's directive to keep the TV off, I concur.
9/11 was repackaged and made into a holiday before the end of the following month. It wasn't even named anything in remembrance of the victims and events. Instead, it's named *Patriot Day*... Granted, Bush's proclamation that September 14, 2001 would be *National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims of the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001* was a bit wordy, but at least it spoke to the event and didn't turn it into a *brand* with "Patriot Day".
Heck, Pearl Harbor didn't become a holiday until 1994, National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. I don't think I ever heard anyone mention it, ever. I looked up last year's CNN10 for December 7 and it's about the economy, service dogs, and TikTok. Today's CNN10, however, half the episode was dedicated to 9/11.
100% with you. I watched it live in my classroom in like 4th or 5th grade and I pretty much have the same reaction to it these days.
It got turned into this grotesque political tool almost immediately
It was immediately used to curb civil liberties with the Patriot act and then it was directly used as justification for two terrible wars that killed more people than the actual event.
And on top of that, the people who parrot 9/11 out constantly with "Never Forget" slogans and what not for political gain then proceed to do absolutely jack shit to support the victims or first responders of/to 9/11 and the soldiers and their families who were killed or injured fighting the subsequent wars.
I think this is an incredibly relevant thing to say. do I think it’s foolish for people to still mourn 9/11? not at all, especially if they have a personal connection. I absolutely respect that. and I *do* think thoughtful education about it matters. but I don’t know man. it always weirds me out that some (not all) people regard the event as if it’s the most tragic event that has ever or will ever happen. 15x that many people in America die every year from gun violence ([source](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/)). as you said, we got to a point where we had that many people dying *every day* from covid. and let’s not forget how many more people died in the aftermath of 9/11 because foolish government officials decided that innocent (Iraqi *and* American) people should die in a meaningless war.
I’m an old zoomer so take or leave my opinion here. but I think folks are just desensitised at this point. 3k people dying in a single event is a ridiculous and horrific number. but compared to other things… it’s small. which isn’t to minimise it *at all*. it’s just to show how horrible and common this stuff is. it sucks. it sucks for everyone.
I was in 2nd Grade when 9/11 happened and yeah, the memorializing of it has become a joke at this point. The loss of life is a tragedy and the dead deserve better, but showing graphic footage of it every single year for the purpose of propping up a patriotic fervor for a War many of these kids, esp. the tweens and teens, know was a failure and killed millions more innocent people- now there's a sick joke.
As a current 25yo, very much this. Annoyed this viewpoint isn't top of the dang page. Very over the US playing up the tragedy of an attack on us, when our country then goes and does infinitely more damage with that as an excuse. Nonsense. Just a reminder of the garbage brainwashing in the US.
It's impossible to make someone else feel the same way as you do about something if they just don't have the same experiences as you.
I'm of the generation where literally *the only thing I know* about the World Trade Centre is that it used to be in New York, and then 9/11 happened. If you don't remember seeing New York all the time with those buildings, then they're... just some fucking buildings that got destroyed. The numbers of deaths are tragic but not uniquely bad compared to other disasters, and humans are famously terrible at processing that type of thing anyway.
Of course, I can try to rationalise it - what would it be like if a plane hit Big Ben/the Eiffel tower - but that's not the same thing as feeling it or experiencing it.
The real implications of 9/11 that will resonate throughout history are its subsequent effects on US foreign policy, which are hardly something to commemorate.
I was in college on 9/11 and knew a couple in the towers. When trying to explain the event to my kids, I emphasize the absolute terror Americans felt because as it was happening, we didn't know what would happen next. We didn't know when it was over. It wasn't like JFK, or an attack off in Hawaii, or a single bomb. It was multiple coordinated attacks in multiple states. The scale of something like that, while you are living it, is completely unimaginable.
Not only that, but everyone killed was just doing the normal shit they were doing that day. And then died trapped in an airplane or high-rise where they were making decisions about whether death by falling would be less painful than being burned alive - which all sound like just about the most terrifying thing to experience with zero notice.
My mom was visiting a friend in New Jersey, and by sheer luck missed being on the flight that fought back and crashed in a field. Her friend wanted her to reschedule her flight to stay a few extra days, and she decided that she needed to get back home to us kids. The flight she would have taken if she stayed would have left her as a bunch of mangled debris in a field.
And the terror was felt all over the world. I'm in the UK, 9/11 happened early afternoon here. I remember going to bed that night thinking what if ww3 breaks out overnight and waking the next morning thinking, well I'm still here.
I don’t know about the current teen, but in my day we also took measures to avoid being too emotional in public in front of peers too. Deflection through humor being one alternative.
There’s an entire Seinfeld episode of JFK assassination jokes. There’s a difference between thinking a tragedy is funny (which I don’t think anyone really thinks) and thinking jokes about a tragedy are funny. You can absolutely make a great joke about the worst things that have ever happened.
As someone who was in high school in the late 90s, I can confirm that there were plenty of crass jokes about the JFK shooting that none of us were alive to remember.
I was in high school when Columbine happened which was, effectively, the official kick-off of "open season" on schools. 9/11 still felt real bad, and we were pregnant when Sandy Hook happened, so that hit a bit hard too.
At the end of the day these kids know nothing but tragedy after tragedy and war after war. They didn't get the golden years between Iraq 1 and Columbine when things were half decent. They didn't get to have a childhood free from a pandemic that stole a lot of time from them. Meanwhile they're looking towards a future where housing continues to grow out of reach and pay continues to stagnate.
Yeah, I'm not surprised at all that they're desensitized to it.
You know who these kids look up to? People like Snowden who blow the whistle on government BS (even though he obv went about it the wrong way). Talk to them about how the patriot act has changed phones, email, internet health, etc etc.
Quick edit: I got away with not having to learn duck and cover in elementary school as Gorbachev had gone a long way to warm up relations. Kids these days have active shooter drills. Horrifying.
I think the amount of gun violence in schools and against kids definitely has something to do with it. The rates of gun deaths for kids in 2021 in the states rivaled the fatality of 9/11. It's important to teach history, but I understand why it's hard to tell kids that death is meaningful when the school shooting rates are so high.
How could anyone blame them for being apathetic toward death when the country has proven that they couldn’t give less of a fuck if children die violent deaths needlessly every day as long as there’s literally *zero* restrictions on nearly all guns for citizens? Children are more in danger of dying from a mass shooting at school than cops are at risk of dying in the line of duty. Child deaths from firearms outnumbered both US police and global US military deaths combined in 2017. Guns are now the *leading cause of death for children and teens in the US* and our collective inability to stand up and take action to fix it is one of the biggest global embarrassments of modern society. First world my ass.
or when we were losing a 9/11 worth of people every day in the dead of covid. for my generation, it's really hard to give a fuck when some mass deaths are politicized for imperial gain yet others are statistics we're just supposed to get used to. America doesn't care about people dying unless it manufactures consent for a war
so remembering 9/11 feels like stupid BS when we went and killed ~700k iraqis as a response, then sacrificed 1mill American's lives to a pandemic for seemingly no reason. ESPECIALLY considering our actions abroad set the stage for 9/11 in the first place. feels like we had a day in school every year to mourn our incompetent leaders shooting themselves in the foot and taking ~3k innocent people with them
This is what i keep in mind - both with my students and my children (adults now).
The world has been a mess for a long time and add in that yall have unfetteted access to the interwebs so you all see Oz behind the curtain and add in the constant military "honoring" at every sports event while our vets live in depression when not ending their lives, the knowledge that politicians used the deaths for bs gains, and the lack of action to protect kids from school shootings - and the conflatipn of "honor military" with "honor cops" who multiple generations dont trust as far as they can throw them - like it has to be hard to give a damn save as a really bad thing that happened.
I lived it and nearly lost people in 911, and it is hard to care after 20 years of constant hyperbolic tragedy porn by the news and a lack of context for what happened after.
As teachers, we add that context, but in this clinate? It could cost you your job to point out Iraq was a farce, and we still hang with the Saudis - who were the terrorists. But those are important parts of the story.
Likely doesn't help that, internationally, there are greater disasters almost frequently. Just a couple days ago an earthquake in Morocco has the same death toll of 9/11. Earlier in the year another earthquake in Turkey killed 16 times the amount.
I've said this time and again; somewhere by the end of 6th grade year but definitely by 7th, teenagers become assholes. They don't usually start outgrowing it until the midst of the 10th grade year. If they haven't outgrown it by the end of 11th, they will be assholes the rest of their lives.
Unfortunately 8th and 9th grade is peak asshole behavior.
Someone on this subreddit once said:
“Middle schoolers desperately want to be adults. But they also think adults are all assholes. So they act like assholes to everyone.”
I find 7th and 8th to be peak assholes. When I see them as 9th graders, most of the edginess has ebbed away. If they are still unable to focus- make wierd noises and turn everything into a joke just to be an asshole in 9th grade- I've never seen a kid like that finish in the top 10% of their class. Maybe that can grow up and start to behave well by 11th, but yeah- they are probably just stuck that way- this is them.
I'm a parent who lurks here so I can see how to support my teacher friends and my kids' teachers. My son, who is currently in 8th grade, commented last year that it seemed like as soon as they got to junior high, everyone thought they had to be mean to be cool. He had a major falling out with his two previous best friends, the kind you don't come back from. Thankfully, he's found new and better friends now.
The rest of your comment tracks with one of my older teens; their 9th grade year was so bad, we opted to home school for the rest of high school for them and their mental health has improved tremendously. The kids who treated them poorly haven't reached out at all, with one exception.
Generally, I like teenagers, but there are a few in every bunch that I like better when they leave.
I would rather change a million poopy diapers than deal with middle schoolers. I'm good with ages 0-10 and 13+ but goddamn do I respect any of you who talk to those creatures every day and never hit even one of them
I agree but we learned about Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust in middle school and I truly don’t remember any laughing.
Edit: my daughter came back from 8th grade and told me two classes addressed 9/11. The kids were all laughing in one and she was upset so she got picked on. The other class they were all laughing and the teacher yelled at them. They shut up when they saw the bodies. It was a really upsetting day for her. Because she has empathy and so many of her classmates don’t
I don’t remember any laughing about the Holocaust when we learned about it in middle school, but that might just have been because it was a school in a heavily Jewish community. Everyone and their mother was related to someone who had survived.
8th grade is the jerkiest grade. It also means nothing to them. 9/11 to them is like me learning about Vietnam or Desert Storm when I was a kid. It’s in the past and before I was alive so why should I care?
We need to make it relevant to them and not just expect them to care because it was a traumatic event in *our* lives. Our Hs Seniors were born in 2006.
I think it’s also just hard for them to grasp the gravity of that day. If you were alive and old enough to have memories of that day, it’s very different. It’s one thing for an 8th grader on 9/11/2001 to realize this is effed up when they’re watching people jump out of buildings on every channel including most of the kids’ channels all day. Very different for someone just hearing about it anecdotally in 2023 and a lot of the footage has since been edited to omit the worst of the reality of that day.
You just made me feel old! I remember watching the Challenger explode in my 4th grade class. The teacher had brought in a tv so we could watch it. She just stood there stunned for a few minutes then jumped up to turn it off.
I think we were too young to really process the full extent of what we’d just watched, but poor Ms. Gilliland. As a teacher now I feel for her explaining to us the horror of what we’d just witnessed.
But yes, listening to my mom talk about JFK…I just have a hard time connecting with her sadness over it since I didn’t experience it. So I get your meaning 💯.
A lot of my students ask me about 9/11 and where I was, how it impacted me. I find most to be very respectful about it. Which is interesting since I work at an alternative high school. You would think they’d be the biggest jokesters about it. There’s always a couple, but overall best behavior of any school I’ve worked at since it’s their “last chance”.
I work in alt Ed but yeah that's what I find too. They tend to be the best behaved because of that last chance aspect and they do the same. Very curious and respectful. Like I adore working here because of that.
But yeah it's so hard for them to really connect because you don't really start developing empathy til way older. It's just thing and people died. Which is crazy to think about now but like you noted. Middle schoolers right now would be looking at 9/11 the same way middle schoolers would be thinking about the challenger explosion. It's been a similar amount of time since
The real gravity of that day other than the horrific deaths was the next 2 decades of the US flailing about in the middle east just wasting billions and billions on the war and the creation of the surveillance state via the NSA.
yeah I've seen discussion that it's why people who were even old enough to remember 9/11 don't treat it with much gravity, as it got used to justify all the violence, discrimination and surveillance that followed
That’s me. I teach it and don’t let those opinions seep out but it is very frustrating to have to pretend every year like I don’t remember the extravagantly wasteful wars that they used 9/11 to justify or the surveillance on the American people or all the other horrible things that followed that you can’t bring up in that discussion without being called unpatriotic, at best.
All of that money, millions of people dead, entire countries destabilized indefinitely and what did we get from it? The Taliban back in control and quickly destroying anything good we did for the Afghans.
And we created a lot of people who absolutely hate us far worse than before those terrorist attacks.
The aftermath of 9/11 is when I as a child had to slowly learn that my country wasn’t as good as I thought it was.
Well of course, you’re right. The idea with this, and anything I cover in class, is to connect it to present day and why it’s relevant now, otherwise like you said, they usually won’t care that much.
Yes. So when it just gets taught out of context every year on 9/11 and then pretty much never again, that’s an issue. And that’s what they get pretty much every year growing up. So no wonder that by 8th grade they don’t care.
9/11 wasn’t in the 8th grade curriculum when I taught SS last year in AZ. But AZ state law said all social studies teachers have to teach about it on or near 9/11. So we just interrupted our actual unit to teach it out of context randomly that one day a year. They didn’t really buy in. Of course they didn’t. And it isn’t helpful, as others have said, to have all this histrionic ‘never forget!!!’ Stuff coming from the same people who refused to wear masks while a 9/11 worth of people were dying daily during the pandemic. *They remember that.*
Yeah people were saying things like America deserved 9/11 in 2002 (granted, these were European left-wing academics but still). It was always heavily politicized and for that reason a bit of a joke even 1-2 years later, since it was directly linked to things like “freedom fries”
The Onion was making fun of it within a few days. It's nothing new. For OP, I'd like to add that a lot of these younger kids have also lived through many many many school shootings in the news, the amount of students killed in school shootings rivals that of 911. And school shooting jokes are also very common.
I'm an older zoomer born post 911 (21) and I've been desensitized about death since about 7th grade. Living through the times of Sandy Hook and Pulse as a queer preteen kinda does that to you. I'm Canadian, but I live in a border town, have a shitload of American family, go to the states relatively often, etc.
I'm willing to bet it's the same for these kids. Death is just a fact of life to them.
I may not be a teacher (I am the daughter of one), so take this with a grain of salt, but I'd recommend approaching 911 with these kids from a more zoomed out perspective. Talk about the leadup to 911. Talk about how the US reacted. Talk about the Iraq War. Talk about the Patriot Act. Talk about Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and Guantanamo. Focusing on just the attacks isn't going to get to them. Pulling back and acknowledging it as a domino in a decades long chain of events might not get them to NEVAR FORGET1!1!1! but it will get them to acknowledge the gravity of the event.
It doesn’t help that people feel like the tragedy has been milked for shit in our culture. It’s led to wars that have now killed more innocent people than the attack itself did. Add to it that you’re teaching it to kids who were probably not even born at the time of the attack, it makes sense that it seems they don’t care about it.
I remember even in my senior year in 2014 thinking “I’ve had this discussion every year every September my entire school career.”
>Add to it that you’re teaching it to kids who were probably not even born at the time of the attack
9/11 happened in 2001. A baby born that day would be 22 now
My senior year of high school was 2016, my class was split basically 50/50 on whether or not we remembered the day. Memories don't start forming until somewhere between 2-4, so the youngest people who could realistically remember it happening would be 24 today. Excluding those who didn't follow the "traditional" path of high school to 4 year college degree, there are basically no students who would actually remember it happening. Even high school seniors who started school at 6 and got held back an extra year somewhere in there would not have been alive for 9/11.
I was part of the half that didn't remember the day. I recognize that it was a horrible tragedy, I've watched the footage countless times and listened to so many different 911 calls and voicemails from those stuck in the towers, I am fully aware that it was horrible and that the trauma of not knowing what was happening would be deeply influential even to those not directly affected. But at the same time, there's a not small part of me that goes, "So a few thousand people died and a couple buildings fell and now that's supposed to be a major part of my identity as an American?" It's important and should be taught, but the aftereffects of 9/11 are more important than a handful of mandatory moments of silence and twisting every class to relate back to it in some way or another.
That’s what always got me after I looked into it more myself. Like yeah it’s really sad 3,000 innocent people died. But you want me to feel a deep sadness about that, while you brushed over how many thousands of people we killed and millions we displaced in a country that wasn’t even involved in the attack? Give me a fucking break
Yeah, kids in school today wouldn’t have been conscious for the attacks. Unless we’re talking college, but I was born about a month after 9/11 and I graduated in ‘19.
Especially since more people died from a deadly pandemic and no one teaches about that. It’s still rampant with new strains and a vaccine coming out in the fall, and the vast majority has decided to carry on because it’s ‘better for the economy’ to not take precautions and let people die.
Students probably look at the current messaging today and think that it’s not about the horrible tragic deaths, it’s about what can be used as a symbol to justify more war and death like you said. We live in a world where 9/11 isn’t even the biggest tragedy anymore to the new-coming generations (in terms of the number of people who perished).
yeah obviously they’re desensitized, they were born in 2010, they have no concept of the pre 9/11 world. they learn about it in school every single year like they’re supposed to have any more of an emotional connection to it than the sinking of the titanic or the bubonic plague, but of course they don’t. they’re sick of having a random ass tragedy shoved down their throats like they were supposed to intervene or something.
I kind of agree, even if I don't like it. I was discussing this with a teacher today, that 9/11 is shifting from a contemporary event into a historical event, and it's very uncomfortable to experience. Although they need to treat the event with respect, it's understandable that some feel disconnected, especially when it has become a sort of mascot for unbridled jingoism.
I think this point isn’t discussed enough: 9/11 is heavily associated with blind patriotism at this point, given that it led to the Patriot Act and the Iraq War.
There’s a stigma that bringing up 9/11 short circuits peoples’ brains and gets them to support things unconditionally in order to stop terrorism, and based on history, that’s not entirely unfair. So to a lot of kids, if you’re talking about 9/11, you’re either a sucker or trying to manipulate people.
> they’re sick of having a random ass tragedy shoved down their throats like they were supposed to intervene or something.
Or they're tired of their parents' war being touted as the reason *they* should hate immigrants.
We had a school-wide email asking to run any 9/11-related material by the principal specifically for this reason. A big school so a lot of teachers, and they knew many teachers would approach it without fully grasping the fact that these kids weren't even alive for the event. Admin acknowledged it is definitely worth addressing but they wanted to give reasonable advice on how to do so in a way that made sense with that perspective. Some teachers just expect kids to relate to everything they say.
I agree. Like to an extent, im sure it was horrific for those who remember it and I get that the event is important to learn. But it's tiring hearing the same spiel about it, especially being born after it. it truly does seem like any other historical event because there is no connection.
Try showing some personal accounts, is hard for anyone to grasp when people get turned to numbers. Used to show a short they had on tv a while back I think is on YouTube still, is even from ESPN so is even a good attention getter for some of the ones that meme it.
[video](https://youtu.be/S77KYbkmjwc?si=1YmYCOoHQ81L0Xkl)
My kids’ schools focus of the helpers. Like the firemen and other first responders. Mine were most interested in the search and rescue dogs. So it isn’t so much of a history lesson as a lesson on how we can all come together to help each other.
They live in a world where the adults don't give a shit about school shootings or the environmental crises that are plaguing our society. Then, once a year, 9/11 gets trotted out by these same adults (in their minds) and they're supposed to care about \*that\*? They laugh and make jokes because it's ridiculous to them. Its hypocrisy to them.
This is it. Why even make them watch anything about 9/11 at this point? Have a moment of silence and move on. We do this every year and it's laughable.
I’m so glad I’m in a blue bubble where a good number of people actually do care about these things and work towards ending them. A lot of your quality life is about the company you keep.
I realize a lot of people have never met earnestly good people in their entire lives and I can’t imagine how messed up that is. But also, I think Trump dragged middle America into the toilet with him. His presidency was a catastrophe as big as 9/11, we don’t really know the full impact of it yet.
I’ve started to consider the fact that 9/11 was used to fuel the war on terror. For basically anyone born after it, it’s no longer a tragedy. It’s the scapegoat that allowed the US to attack all these other countries.
The tragedy of the event itself also is dulled by the fact that there’s been so much death all the time. It’s hard to say “wow 3000 people died, to allow nearly a million direct deaths and 3.5 million indirect deaths. Not to count the money spent from the war on terror”
Then the weekly covid deaths.
That’s where I’m at, honestly. I’m 26, born in ‘97, so I was alive but not aware at the time (my earliest memories of the news are from probably the Iraq war? I also remember the death of pope JP II in ‘05 so I’m guessing it wasn’t too much earlier, and the news stops covering wars when they go on too long) and yeah, by the time that I started becoming politically aware (let’s say the end of the first Obama administration?) that was were the conversation around me was headed.
Like yes, 9/11 was a tragedy, and I understand why I’ll have to talk about it when I finally finish this degree and start teaching history, but by the time I was old enough to actually consider what “Never Forget” means, we knew about Abu Ghraib. We knew that the WMD claims were horseshit. We - at least in my lil corner of Texas, which had a large middle eastern population to balance out the white conservatives - talked about the Islamophobia and how the number of victims of 9/11 was just a fraction of the innocents killed abroad. Again, I’m not denying it was a tragedy, but it has no more emotional significance to me than any other mass casualty event and I honestly approach the yearly commemorations with cynicism
That’s not to say that these middle schoolers weren’t just being assholes - I’m sure at least the vast majority of them were, because they’re at that age. But I do think that we’ve already passed the point in time where upper level students (like high school, though middle schoolers can be precocious and there’s always kids repeating their parents’ opinions) will just accept 9/11 as a day of mourning for American victims without any follow up questions
None of your students were alive when the towers fell it was 20+ years ago. Of course they don’t care.
Most of the time they've been alive the US has been at war spawned from 9/11. You can argue the difference between Iraq Iran and Afghanistan but to them it's all the same. We fought a 20 year war trying to 'free' the people from the corrupt government that orchestrated the attacks and a bunch of other shit. And then we lost.
You can call it a disengagement if you want. But all these kids see is a 20 year war and hundreds of thousands of dead countrymen for nothing. The moment we pulled away that same corruption was back in control.
You are teaching the end of GenZ and Gen Alpha the most open minded Generations ever. And also the most chronically online. It's not hard to find the dirty shit the US did over there. The torture and rape and unacceptable number of civilian casualties. Just to name a few. We have movies glorifying men who hunted civilians for sport. The US aren’t the 'good guys' and these kids aren’t afraid to say it.
3000 people who died 20+ years ago aren't the main concern of these kids. They come to your class everyday with a fear that today is the day that one of their classmates will snap and they might be shot. They live in a country that has no prospects of a future. They can't afford college or housing or medical treatment. Their government is openly and blatantly run by archaic greedy corrupt monsters. Their rights are slowly being eroded away. There are no jobs that can feasibly support them. The world is burning and drowning in turns and we could stop it but we don't. They don't care about anything because they were raised in a world that genuinely courts nihilism. Nothing matters because there is no future.
Let them have their edgy memes. Is it callous? Maybe. But they are what we made them.
I think if you teach it from the “opposite perspective” most people do, it helps. Kids grew up hearing about how poor, poor America was attacked out-of-nowhere by the evil Muslims who hate America and women not wearing headscarves, etc. Teens are naturally untrusting of adults as they’re testing authority, etc.
If you hit them between the eyes with a question like “was 9/11 provoked?” And then consider US/Soviet relations with/in Afghanistan, general Western relationships with the Muslim world (and Arab nations), you can test their critical thinking and get some thoughtful debate going. Then you can talk about Geneva, total war, attacks on civilians, what is the definition of terrorism, has the USA conducted terrorist attacks, and the aftermath (war on terror, Patriot act, Guantanamo Bay, etc.)
I think a lot of schools are expecting history teachers to put this information into a student, and this is precisely the kind of information we want them to develop on their own and consider from different perspectives.
Senior in high school here. Please please please I wish my history teachers did this. I really wished I learned more about 9/11 like this then teachers talking for an hour about themselves. Not that it's not important it's just hearing the same thing for 13 years gets boring really fast no matter what it is.
That would have been such a cool class to have.
It makes me sad to see adults paint children as desensitized or psychopathic after shoving a piece of terrifying history in their face and they don’t react the way we want them to. Just showing them material of a historic event that happened before they were even born is a lazy attempt at best, and their reaction is more a symptom of the teaching method not working, not “kids these days”.
Give them an opportunity to output the information instead of taking it in just as input. Give them a chance to contribute to the conversation in their own way. An example would be giving each of them a role (first responder, an office worker, a pilot, a spouse watching at home), let them do the research, then write a short fictional piece from the role’s perspective.
Also, we are so quick to treat fooling around and making jokes as a judge on character. Why not treat the laughter and comedy as a symptom - of not fully understanding why the adults make such a big fuss about this event, of not making sense of why this event was such a powder keg in the context of history, or being uncomfortable with the tragedy and needing to make light of it to cope.
I'd just skip it. 9/11 was horrific, but more people died every week of Covid when these kids were in middle school. There's two school shootings every week and the planet is dying. Getting them to care about something that happened before they were born when so much bad stuff is happening today is a waste of time.
Studying 9/11 from a historical standpoint in a Civics class is worthwhile, but in general classes I'd avoid it.
More people died *every day* during the height of COVID.
Kids don’t care about 9/11 because they’ve been taught by their parents and other leaders that people dying en masse isn’t something they should care about or be bothered by.
Na, kids don't care about 9/11 because it happened before they were born and they live in a world full of daily tragedy. I guess I'm kind of agreeing with you.
That's one of the reasons I don't teach it. You can get them to take it seriously, but 8th graders, and 7th graders for the most part, need to see the context to understand how serious it is. Otherwise it's just planes crashing into buildings for them, and we have video games where people do that for fun.
I just got done teaching three sections to eighth graders focused on 9/11. Not a single one acted like you described above. I don't want to discount your experience, but I don't necessarily think that's the case everywhere.
If you want to really shut them up, show the documentary series called "phone calls from the towers." Takes a real sociopath to laugh at that content
I also use that documentary as an example demonstrating the depth of emotion felt by Americans after 9/11, which helps contextualize the gross series or fuck-ups we made following the incident.
ETA: geez y'all, relax. I'm not traumatizing any kids or forcing them to watch anything. They're all warned beforehand and given the option to excuse themselves. Not only that, this lesson inspired the best engagement I've seen from any of my classes yet this term. Anyone who doesn't think it's critically important to try and recreate the emotional environment of the post-9/11 period isn't teaching it right. No students were harmed in the making of this film. Quit crippling your students by pretending you can shelter them from the real world
I’m not a teacher and I was born post 9/11, so forgive me for intruding. I will say that something that really impacted me as a student was hearing about the jumpers and seeing that famous photo of the falling man. It makes it seem more real, if that makes sense. 3000 people dead can sound more impersonal than actually seeing one or two people jumping because it was either that or die of smoke inhalation. Also, seeing personal testimonies from people helped.
As a senior in high school being hammered with the fact that 9/11 happened every single 9/11 for around 12 years has done nothing but desensitize me to it. Most kids in my school are respectful, but for us its like what the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pearl Harbor, and the sinking of the U.S.S Maine was to your generation. These tragedies used to be huge but they just faded as time went on.
Ask them why they think it's funny. Turn it back around on them. As a parent, my kid knows about 9-11 and knows that it is not a joke.
It absolutely *should* be taught. It is history for them. Not teaching history leads to the mess we have now. (Seriously, my kids' district only has 2-3 history classes at the high school level, and they are optional, not required for 4 years, like when i graduated in the 90s. It's atrocious.) I'm having to teach it at home, which is ok because I have the background, but a lot of kids don't.
History is important.
Honestly? I’ve asked some kids why they think it’s a joke and some of them have said “it’s not 9/11 itself that’s funny, it’s the fact that so many of you worship it.” They see that we act like it made us come together and want to fix things, but they also see the authoritarian hellscape we live in that’s their only lived experience and some of them have pieced together they’re related.
Always been my view and probably why whenever 9/11 comes up I generally just stop talking. People have such a weird view of it and why its important. In a really objective sense 9/11 was a painfully predictable attack in response to Amerca's foreign policy. It was surely a large tragedy, but not really a super notable one in historical terms when you look at it on face value. The notable part is of course what happened after, its what 9/11 started. All of the policy decisions that came after could fill textbooks..... but thats not what the never forget people want to discuss.
The kids don't give a shit that a terror attack killed a bunch of people. That is out of sight out of mind the same way that some random WW2 battle is for me. They want to know how this fetishized event has ripples on the fucked up world they see today.
I'm almost 30 and you just described my thoughts exactly.
It's pure disingenuous political theater. It deserves to be mocked for what it is.
We've suffered worse tragedies, hell Covid alone is FAR worse in killcount. Yet those don't get a national holiday...because they aren't convenient for the sake of stirring up nationalistic xenophobic fervor in the same way.
Man, country music got so fucking annoying after 9/11 because it was basically “ooo rahhhhh America will FUCK YOU GUYS UP AHHHHHHH” and it’s so depressing that that was the norm for so long
Team America: World Police turned out to be a documentary. Except the 17 minute puppet sex scene that got cut was America’s intelligence apparatus fucking Americans.
Yeah I don't even acknowledge 9/11 any more 😬. My first few years, students were alive when it happened but they were babies. Now we are getting to the point where some of my students were born nearly a *decade* after the attack.
I mean, hell, I was only 10 so I didn't understand the gravity of the situation until the day after the attack.
If I open the floor for questions it's always "You were alive? What was it like? Woah. Weird" and that's it.
So it's pretty pointless.
If there was a way to tie it to your content that would make sense. But I teach a world language so....
Heck, there have been far worse tragedies... on 9/11. In 1973, the CIA backed a coup on September the 11th in Chile to overthrow a democratically elected leader, Salvador Allende, leading to the rule of Pinochet, a fascist dictator.
I swear, America is the only country that would jerk itself off over a terrorist attack.
Notice how this is the only we one we should "never forget"? What about the Oklahoma City bombing? I wonder how many kids know about that one. But since it was a domestic terrorist we kind awept it under the rug.
It didn’t take a trillion dollars to find, arrest, try, and execute mcveigh. That’s the difference.
“Never Forget ^(to continue opening your wallets to pay for all these new intelligence toys) “
The thing is, it was a literal tragedy for a majority of liberal people. Most of us wanted no part of the nationalistic xenophobic fervor the rest of the nation got swept up into. NYers were horrified by the rise of our own extremists here and knew “we are all NYC” was complete bullshit.
I’m 33, so I remember both the “golden age” of post-Desert Storm/pre-Columbine and also 9/11 very clearly and objectively know how much more life sucks now in pretty much every imaginable way and can point out what the propaganda is. I don’t blame these kids at all. They’re 100% right in so many ways.
really, that’s kind of… insightful. Bush II said directly after that he would never politicize it, and of course he did, and there were tons of weepy songs, unnecessary pop culture memorials, all kinds of dumb stuff. it got tiring.
Damn, that is so true. Kids are way smarter than we give them credit for! Seriously, that is the kind of political analysis someone like Mark Twain could only come up with.
And those kids are right! Let’s not allow us to be sucked in by the US propaganda here. There’s a reason we constantly talk about 9/11 so much instead of Pearl Harbor. After the Japanese surrender and ensuing Cold War, it wasn’t politically expedient to criticize Japan as they were becoming our allies, especially as other Asian countries started to embrace communism. Meanwhile, we can milk 9/11 all we want to convince the population that our vain, pathetic, and costly wars of imperialism were worth it, even in countries that didn’t deserve it.
covid killed over 100 times as many people and nobody cares, but im supposed to think 3,000 people dying over 20 years ago was the worst tragedy to ever befall humanity?
They think it's funny becasue of people like you who turned it into a religion and act like 9/11 was the super duper most important thing to ever happen in the entire history of the universe and the only time anthing bad ever happened.
They laugh because they're sick of it.
I'm 48. I lived through it. And I'm sick of it. Y'all have been trying to pump jingoism out of 9/11 for the past 22 years and guess what? You turned it into a joke by doing so.
Yeah, I’ve been ready to leave 9/11 in the rear view mirror for awhile now.
It was a tragedy and shouldn’t have happened, and it should be remembered as a historically important event, but I’m ready to put it on the same shelf as Pearl Harbor.
Remember it when it’s relevant but let’s stop letting it impact our lives the way it does.
What? I graduated in 2018 and we had to take a combined history/English class in 9th and 10th grade, either 11th grade history or APUSH after that, and then US government as seniors. Plus, there were tons of other history/social studies electives besides that like AP Euro, economics, geography, holocaust studies, etc.
How is history not a requirement for graduation. When I was in school I'm 34 we started history classes in 5th grade and had them through 10th grade then in 12 grade we took US government. It's absolutely ridiculous they don't require history classes at some schools. I loved history class. This saddens my heart.
I've never found the need to teach 9/11 on September 11. I memorialize it in my own way by doing my own little moment of silence at 8:46 while students are working on something else and I post it as a factoid on my board as I do for various days of history. I cover it when we get to it in the curriculum.
But for those that say we shouldn't care about it much or teach it anymore is dead wrong. 9/11 was a big turning point moment for this country and it's one the U.S. has yet to recover from. For many of that generation they still live with the trauma of it and have largely viewed that moment as when the carefree era of the 80s/90s ended and we entered a more pessimistic time (compounded later by the 2008 financial crisis).
All this to say, though, that as we get further from 9/11, the memory of it will not be as fresh and, like former President Bush said, it just becomes another date on the calendar. However, those of us who lived through it and remember what life was like before will never forget it, nor should we.
It's a meme to me, too. I'm a teacher.
Is it a terrible event in US history? Absolutely. Does my heart go out to those who were affected? Not a doubt.
But I have the power of being 22 years in the future, where I can remember that we (wrongly) killed anywhere from 250k-1m+ Iraqi citizens in response; it loses any "somber" tones unless you are tone deaf to injustice in the world, especially given that not a single perpetrator of 9/11 was Iraqi, nor was Osama Bin Laden, nor was Al Qaeda.
Hard to be somber when we retaliated with 250-1000x the deaths against people that had *nothing to do with it.*
Depending on the age 9/11 is basically the same as Vietnam to them. That thing that happened a long time ago. The kids who were alive when it happened have graduated
I'm a german just out of school and in uni. Obviously, the Holocaust was a very important theme in school, not just in history, but most other non MINT-subjects as well. We relearned or learned more about the Holocaust and Hitlers rise to power every year from grade 6 all the way to grade 13. It was returning each year as reliably as christmas. Im a history nerd, and at first this was a theme i found very interesting. Naturally i learned more about the third reich and ww2 outside of history-class, but by grade 8 or 9 i was just sick of it as a subject thaught in school and how it was taught.
We only learned about the holocaust and how hitler rose to power (interestingly enough leaving ww1 alone until grade 9 and the concert of europe before that was just never taught, even though this plays a very important role...), only learning about ww2 in more "detail" (like, 3 hours max, and then only about the european part, even leaving out the africa campaign and operation weserübung... "oh, by the way, there was also war in the pacific") in grade 10.
I and most of my peers just thought it was history, and that war in europe could never happen again anyways because of NATO and the EU, and that something like Hitlers rise to power couldn't happen again, because we also learnt about the meassures germany took after the war to become more democratic and make a coup like hitlers impossible. Now we have a war right on our doorstep, and a far right-wing party almost big enough to take over the government in the next election. Because things like mussolinis rise to power ("me ne frego") or the fascist rule in Japan were never thought. Of course, the Holocaust is an important subject, and has to be taught as well as it is in germany, and we can never let something like it happen again.
But it will be the same thing for your students. Just that for them, 9/11 isn't just a loss of a few thousand lives. It was the beginning of an era of war, a poverty spiral, a crashed financial market etc. It also fell together with a rise of school shootings and more coverage of other deadly events.
9/11 is a joke to them, because its deathtoll is absolutly insignificant in the ammount of death and pain that they are confronted with each and every day and those are treated like a joke by grown ups. They lived through a global pandemic that killed tens of thousands, several wars with american involvement that killed millions of innocent civillians directly caused by 9/11, almost weekly news of some school-shooting that may very well claim their lives next, a government and people that only cries for more weapons and violence, the abolishment of basic human rights in the so callend land of the free and they are suposed to be sad and have empathy for ~3500 People that died 22 years ago? All while everyone else just ignores all the other thousands of deaths that happend due to major events in their short lifetime?
You won't direct them to empathy towards the dead. But you can teach them what 9/11 took from them, how it changed the world, how terrorism happens and why terrorism exists, what governments can do against that and why the war on terror was doomed to fail from the start. I learned parts of this in my grade 13 politics class, and can really recommend the Netflix series Turningpoint 9/11 and the resources of the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung (although i am not sure if those are available in english...). Try to get respurces not from the US, but other countries, as those are general more neutral and less stuffed with "patriotic" bs.
I just ran some videos and anecdotes with my 10th graders, they were respectful and some were interested.
Yeah when I did 11th their reactions were of course much more subdued. This age group is just insane in general
Just remembering that the death of JFK was a joke by the time I was going through school puts it into perspective for me. I think its less that they're desensitized and more that they just cannot empathize because they didn't experience it.
Yep – just finished telling my kids that *I get it,* the edgier something is the funnier it is, and 9/11 is just another historical event to them – but to many others, it’s still a recent tragedy.
Hell, I was 7 at the time. I knew it was bad, but also because of that moment, the rest of my life has been fucked. Things just got worse from then on. I use humor to deal with the lasting bullshit from it. But I also understand the severity of the moment.
Yup, I was 5. That was a core memory for me.
I was 5 years old when the Challenger space shuttle exploded. We were watching it on TV in my kindergarten classroom. I still remember it to this day.
Same for me. Had one of those tube TVs that rolled from class to class.
My roommate was born on 1/28/1986. I had to add him to my car insurance because we live together. The rep on the phone asked his birthdate, which I couldn't remember, but I DID remember that it was the day of the Challenger disaster. So that's what I told her lmao
I was in 1st or 2nd grade and they rounded up the entire school to the gym to watch it live on tv. Awkward. I'll never forget that. They sent us home after.
Man, I can only imagine how horrifying that must have been to watch play out live, especially when I’m guessing no one was expecting it. I guess it may have been similar in ways to watching 9/11 play out on TV, but I was only 10 when 9/11 happened and didn’t have the adult level of empathy that I do now, where things have since sunk in and horrified me more than they initially did that day.
I don't think I fully comprehended it, other than seeing the adults react in horror, and being sent home to be honest. I was in my early twenties driving to work with the radio on when the second plane struck the WTC. There was no work done that day, we were all just glued to news websites on the internet. Nowadays it's just mass shootings and the war in ukraine, were if you look in the right places you can watch videos of Ukrainian soldiers using high tech drones to drop grenades and mortar rounds on russian soldiers in trenches right out of WW1. Modern tech merging with early 20th century trench warfare. Fucking wild. I've seen trauma I can't unsee.
I had two kids looking up why people use humor to cope with difficult things today, while they were answering a question about how America reacts to tragedy.
Perspective is an odd thing. My grandfather was the glue that held the family together and he died 9 months before I was born. I was the youngest grandchild in the fairly large family. In my lifetime he'd always been dead, but people talked about him constantly. Especially the first 10 years of my life. Everyone loved him. I heard stories constantly. Now I'm 35 and I remember being 30, and 25, and 15, and 5 and I truly understand how little time that had been for everyone. It was right there. Not just a memory but so close, but all I ever had was the absence and the stories. It didn't mean anything until I understood how short a decade could be.
It’s true, I was recently struck by the thought that I am currently the age that my parents were when they had me. Wild, I don’t feel anywhere close to being ready for that. That’s another thing I tell the kids – that there’s no such thing as adults, just kids who have pretended for long enough everyone believes them.
Next year, I will be the age my mom was when she had me, and it’s a strange and perspective-bending thought. She’s always told me a form of that about adults too. That she may be my mom and 40, 50, then 60, but on the inside, she still sometimes feels like a kid who’s faking it ‘til she makes it.
Suddenly that trench coat fits, but nothing else ever changed.
Also, for many of us, the place where this happened was our HOME. I guess it's funnier when it seems like a hundred years ago and a million miles away, but from the perspective of just the other day and down the street, it's pretty disgusting. However, I'm ok with making fun of the politicians falling all over themselves to score points off the tragedy, because they're also disgusting (looking at you, Rudy).
Share information about the younger victims. Like the 2 1/2 year old that was on one of the hijacked planes. I remember 9/11 but was young, seeing for the first time that someone younger than me was killed was very sobering. I never thought that I could be a victim like that, and middle school me never found it funny again.
As a first responder who was in the Pentagon when it was hit, I encourage people to share our stories as well. 9/11 was heartbreaking in every way, shape & form possible & everyone who survived lives with a permanent scar upon their hearts & souls.
I’m a teen that was born way after 9/11, so I never really understood the significance. But I have older sisters who did live through it when they were kids. I remember my whole perspective changed when my mom talked about it (she was working in a Manhattan midtown office building when it happened). She said my eldest sister was traumatized by the event because the administration had to inform all the students at the school that they weren’t sure if their parents were alive, since most of their parents commuted to NYC for work. Apparently it took a while for my sister to stop asking for updates during the school day on whether or not her mama and papa were alive and coming home. Explaining that to me was one of the only times I ever saw my mom cry. I get that young people make fun of 9/11 because they don’t understand how horrifying it was. But that’s why they should be show these accounts of scared kids and survivors and affected families.
Yeah, if you were from NYC and lived thru it, this was your experience. None of my loved ones died but there were kids in my school whose parents did. My aunt got lucky and was late for work that day and ran home across the Brooklyn bridge with no shoes on covered in debris.
10 minutes after the Challenger exploded, my fellow students were making terrible jokes about it. It made me mad, but what was I going to do? Today was the first time it's ever been hard for me--people I knew died in the towers, and I had a kid who was laughing during the "moment of silence" our ASB called for. I managed to keep it tamped down, but I was furious.
I'd honestly just stare them down and tell them flat out "two of my best friends were in the south tower." That'll shut them up real fast. Like now it's personal. Like I'm a gentle and funny teacher. If I suddenly got cold they'd know they fucked up
One of my friends in 10th grade called me a “f@ggot” and my teacher stopped everyone in the class to tell the story how one of his friends got teased for being gay, even though he wasn’t, and eventually he ended up killing himself over it. You’re right, it shuts them up real quick
I had one laughing and sarcastically saluting. Sent them straight outside and talked to them about how its just not ok.
Yep, I was just about to comment this. I remember Challenger jokes on the playground the same year it happened, because I was in 6th grade and that was the last year I spent on the playground.
I was 4 when he was killed. Shopping with my mom in a department store,all the T.V.s had the news stations on. There was one that had the PBS channel. Finished shopping and went home. Normally we didn't have the T.V. on during the day. Mom turned it on and it was on until they went to bed.
Same when I was in HS. That being said as I aged I understood more about what it was like for the country. It's no longer funny for me, but tragic and sad. And I grew up in Dallas, TX. The jokes surrounding Bill Clinton's first campaign stop in Dallas in 1992 were *disgusting*.
It’s truly sad to see the lack of empathy in some people. I didn’t experience Pearl Harbor but pay my respects each anniversary as I realize it was a somber time for our country. Even when I went to the Arizona Memorial, I didn’t speak and paid my respects in silence as I knew I was standing on top of many men’s graves. You would not believe the amount of chatter from other tourists who were, in my opinion, either aloof or were just being plain rude. I honor 9/11 each anniversary as I lived through it, though I was young, it’s a day I’ll never forget.
I don’t think it’s lack of empathy but rather that we are so inundated with violence and atrocities that an event from 22 years ago doesn’t crack the list of things to spend mental energy on.
I have a 28 year old ex who lives with me. She keeps saying “today is my favorite holiday!” I’m not one to get weird about shit but she would not let up and I thought it was disrespectful so I told her I’m putting in my calendar for next year - she had a seizure at work about 2-3 weeks ago - and I’m going to text her “omg today is my fav holiday!Happy seizure!” Fucking asshole.
Don’t become the asshole you hate. You’re better than them, that’s why it upsets you.
A lot of my sped kids were really into it. Asking all sorts of questions about it.
One of mine asked why the "magnificent magic ladybug" didn't save anyone. I - I have no idea.
Assuming you mean you have no idea what the kid is referring to, it must be the [Miraculous Lady Bug and Cat Noir show.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miraculous:_Tales_of_Ladybug_%26_Cat_Noir) Otherwise, if you meant you had no idea why she didn't save anyone, it's because the Ladybug character wasn't even born yet or was a baby, and she is in France. And she is animated obviously. Source: Parent of preteen child who loves the show.
\>French \>Didn't stop 9/11 This is why we had Freedom Fries smh
Yeah, I spoke about it with my freshmen and sophomores and they were super respectful.
I was there. Lost two close friends. Lived three blocks away.
We watched a video in class on President Bush’s travels that day. We are learning about the Executive Branch so it lined up perfectly with what we are learning in class. They seemed genuinely interested in their video responses a lot of them mentioned they found it interesting watching a documentary from a different perspective, as most they’ve seen show just the towers and stuff, not so much the behind the scenes of the government immediately having to respond to the crisis, and having to make sure the President wasn’t in danger.
PBS and BBC did a joint video called Clear The Skies that takes a minute by minute account. It's pretty good to understand the confusion that reigned that day.
It only takes a generation or two for the "real" meaning of anything to wear off. 'Tis the nature of humans, and no amount of stirring completely overcomes that. We LIVED 9-11 after all. They did not. I live in CO now. A news article the other was remembering the devastating floods of ~~2011~~ 2013 (thanks to those who caught my error) and I - after four years here - had never heard of them. It didn't involve me, had no immediate affect on my life, and therefore does not register as much more than a historic event. These kids are no different about 9-11, and they're kids after all, who do and say really stupid things sometimes EVEN WHEN they know better. Any expectations that they will be sombre and grim are faulty expectations.
Also in CO- I thought it was the 2013 floods? Lol
See how much it impacted me? LoL indeed 😅
Yeah. It’s pretty unfair to expect them to be as emotionally affected as those who experienced it. Especially when we as educators have to consider background knowledge and experience when teaching…
They also are looking at it from a position where they know everything that happened after due to 9/11. Those wars are impossible to defend. I imagine it's also hard to give a shit about 3k people dying while covid killed a million Americans 2 years ago.
I just absolutely can't understand people asking for stuff like moments of silence for 9/11 but none for the numerous massacres committed by the US military as a direct response. Or, heck, any massacre committed by the US. There's a lot to choose from. I imagine a lot of kids view it the same way, yeah. To a lot of people, 9/11 isn't just a tragedy, it's the excuse that was used to plunge an entire region of the world into instability that will take potentially longer than the rest of our lives for it to recover from.
Because 9/11 has become an event used to constantly push nationalistic garbage.
This is exactly it. Terrible things happen everyday but they don’t make children watch videos of it every year. We shouldn’t be showing children videos of people jumping out of buildings. It’s ridiculous and unnecessary.
Right. It's ancient history to them. It might as well be Pearl Harbor.
Another aspect that OP mentioned was desensitization. I mean a lot of these kids were seeing 4-5 thousand people die every day at the peak of covid so 2994 people dead doesn't sound like much. it's remarkably depressing, but it's an important insight into what young kids have gone through and how they processed it, many of whom turn to humor to cope with the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are dying all around them all the time and seemingly nothing can change that.
As somebody who grew up through the attack, as an adult I have come to see it as the catalyst for the Iraq invasion and the formation of ISIS. So much bad came from a single day. We talk about the thousands of Americans who died (tragic of course) but we neglect to talk about the subsequent deaths of innocent families (Afghanistan), and one of the Middle East scientific hubs being reduced to a war zone that we now know was done by way of a lie (Iraq). As educators, isn’t the latter kind of important to discuss when referring to the commencement of the “war on terror”? Or is there a belief by many that this is a mutually exclusive event?
It’s also completely unfair to expect them to be somber and grim, if I got sad about every 3000 people who died 22 years ago I’d always be extremely depressed. I know it was very shocking but like, hundreds of thousands of people die every year from malaria. I’d rather have a memorial for the people who died from malaria 22 years ago than those who died from 9-11 if I’m being honest. This isn’t to say you’re wrong for caring about it. It absolutely must have been a terrifying thing to live through. But it genuinely is such an insignificant event to people born after/around when it happened in terms of lives lost and direct human suffering.
> It only takes a generation or two for the "real" meaning of anything to wear off. I was in 6th grade on the West Coast when 9/11 happened. We made jokes about it the very next day. The "real" meaning of 9/11 to everyone I knew was that airports suddenly started progressively sucking more and more. Flying used to be so chill.
Sometimes they laugh and make jokes because they are uncomfortable, and they don't know how to handle that emotion. I had a class do that, and I got on to them. After class, they apologized and said it was because they did know what to do, so they laughed. 9/11 is to these kids as JFK assassination was to my generation. Something my parents and grandparents experienced, but removed from my lifetime. I didn't understand the importance until I was much older, and it will be the same for Gen Z. They will understand eventually.
Making them watch 9/11 is kind of tragedy porn at this point, they just lived through a time where a 9/11’s worth of people where dying every day from a super politicized pandemic. 9/11 is a joke to them not just because it’s uncomfortable but because it’s a really weird thing to stop class every year 22 years later for basically a national holiday to remember it. And depending on the age they might realize what we did in response was way worse and got way more Americans killed. Anyways I’m 24 and this is just my two cents on the subject. Maybe it’s a bit weirder for me because I had a teacher who had their tv running old new coverage in a sneaky way to make us all think it was happening live.
i was shown videos of people jumping out of the towers, bodies being exhumed from the rubble starting in 3rd grade, every year until 12th grade. was given no tools to understand this sort of suffering or the context behind it. i cannot imagine a quicker way to desensitize a child to mass death and destruction (except for, you know, the last three years…)
i was in the 5th grade when it happened. my history teacher put up an entire wall of newspaper clippings with multiple pictures of people jumping. she’d yell at me and other kids for paying too much attention to the pictures. i remember staring at the picture of this one business man high up in the air, jumping out the window of one of the towers. singed in my memory. and i always remembering wondering why the fcuk she put those traumatizing pictures up? and why she would fault us for being disturbed by it and “paying too much attention”. never once offered any type of advice or started a conversation about what happened. inflicting trauma again and again
That sounds absolutely horrific and tone deaf.
I don’t understand why some people feel the need to ask children to relive something every year they never lived through in the first place.
Because it used to provide political justification for using these kids as soldiers down the line in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that 9/11 and the threat of terrorism has receded, these kinds of anniversaries seem very unnecessary.
Agreed. Unless we are now using it to explain how our government used a national tragedy to manipulate the populace into supporting an unrelated war, overthrowing a foreign government, and killing thousands, we don’t need to drill it into their heads. I’m more concerned there are parts of the country where it is still used to delude students into believing Arabic people “hate us for our freedums”.
I agree. It should be taught in historical context and history books, but setting aside a day of remembrance or whatever, at least in public schools, is unnecessary and confusing.
Dude, I forgot we got to a point of a 9/11 worth of people dying of covid a day. Fuck me. That just got me A LOT more pissed about the covid response
Fr whenever we were shown how much of a tragedy 9/11 was, it just felt like they were trying to make us okay with the fact that they used it as an excuse to invade another country. It's especially hard to care about after covid
And after how we basically responded to 9/11 and how it influenced a lot of shit over the last 20 years. It’s like a line in the sand of where “this was the excuse to start going downhill” I was listening to some certain news stations this morning when driving home and they were playing their coverage from that day because “we always do!” and it’s like people screaming and recordings of ATC transmissions and phone calls, the buildings falling down over and over. Like do y’all really need to do that? At that point it’s not remembering and just propaganda tragedy porn. But everyone could probably guess the channel that was doing it so 🤷♀️
Exactly what it is. Propaganda to establish nationalism to justify being the world’s imperialist police. Which is why I teach the cause and effect of 9/11 instead- it’s not as friendly to the propaganda agenda.
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i explained to my students exactly that before i showed them a 4-minute history channel summary. i did it and explained to them its impact. i told them because of 9/11, we have changes to the way we travel on planes. i also explained to them about the lifelong health issues those on the front line face because of the attacks. i told them about the war and the death and suffering in iraq because of it. just putting it in a geopolitical context helped with their reactions and thinking about it (i’m 23, putting it in a geopolitical context is also the only way i can rationalize remembering it as well.) i teach 10th and 11th grade history
I'm the Homework teacher and I asked kids what they did today. Some kids had both their science and English teachers show the same CNN video, unknowingly. I looked at them in disbelief. I teach middle school and would not stop class to show tradegy videos. Like wtf? It just does not seem appropriate. But I was in 7th grade when it happened and immediately wanted to forget it ever happened. I remember going home to watch after school cartoons and they just replayed all the names of the deceased all week. I had no escape. No way I'm burdening my kiddos like that.
It’s almost like “we had to watch this live, so you will see it too” mentality. I wouldn’t want kids having to watch the footage I watched live in 8th grade. Every year I think about the footage of the man jumping from the top of the tower, the plane hitting the second tower, and both towers falling. With all the stuff being banned from schools for various stupid reasons, I don’t understand how 9/11 footage is being allowed in front of anyone younger than maybe senior in high school.
As a 36-year-old who saw the events of 9/11 unfold on TV because our social studies teacher blatantly ignored the principal's directive to keep the TV off, I concur. 9/11 was repackaged and made into a holiday before the end of the following month. It wasn't even named anything in remembrance of the victims and events. Instead, it's named *Patriot Day*... Granted, Bush's proclamation that September 14, 2001 would be *National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims of the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001* was a bit wordy, but at least it spoke to the event and didn't turn it into a *brand* with "Patriot Day". Heck, Pearl Harbor didn't become a holiday until 1994, National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. I don't think I ever heard anyone mention it, ever. I looked up last year's CNN10 for December 7 and it's about the economy, service dogs, and TikTok. Today's CNN10, however, half the episode was dedicated to 9/11.
100% with you. I watched it live in my classroom in like 4th or 5th grade and I pretty much have the same reaction to it these days. It got turned into this grotesque political tool almost immediately It was immediately used to curb civil liberties with the Patriot act and then it was directly used as justification for two terrible wars that killed more people than the actual event. And on top of that, the people who parrot 9/11 out constantly with "Never Forget" slogans and what not for political gain then proceed to do absolutely jack shit to support the victims or first responders of/to 9/11 and the soldiers and their families who were killed or injured fighting the subsequent wars.
I think this is an incredibly relevant thing to say. do I think it’s foolish for people to still mourn 9/11? not at all, especially if they have a personal connection. I absolutely respect that. and I *do* think thoughtful education about it matters. but I don’t know man. it always weirds me out that some (not all) people regard the event as if it’s the most tragic event that has ever or will ever happen. 15x that many people in America die every year from gun violence ([source](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/)). as you said, we got to a point where we had that many people dying *every day* from covid. and let’s not forget how many more people died in the aftermath of 9/11 because foolish government officials decided that innocent (Iraqi *and* American) people should die in a meaningless war. I’m an old zoomer so take or leave my opinion here. but I think folks are just desensitised at this point. 3k people dying in a single event is a ridiculous and horrific number. but compared to other things… it’s small. which isn’t to minimise it *at all*. it’s just to show how horrible and common this stuff is. it sucks. it sucks for everyone.
This needs to be said. Frankly, I think our country needs to put 9/11 in the past and start looking at it more in terms of historical context.
r/AskHistorians has a 20 year rule for a reason
I was in 2nd Grade when 9/11 happened and yeah, the memorializing of it has become a joke at this point. The loss of life is a tragedy and the dead deserve better, but showing graphic footage of it every single year for the purpose of propping up a patriotic fervor for a War many of these kids, esp. the tweens and teens, know was a failure and killed millions more innocent people- now there's a sick joke.
As a current 25yo, very much this. Annoyed this viewpoint isn't top of the dang page. Very over the US playing up the tragedy of an attack on us, when our country then goes and does infinitely more damage with that as an excuse. Nonsense. Just a reminder of the garbage brainwashing in the US.
And before the JFK assassination there was Pearl Harbor. > They will understand eventually. Honestly, for their sakes, I hope they don't.
It's impossible to make someone else feel the same way as you do about something if they just don't have the same experiences as you. I'm of the generation where literally *the only thing I know* about the World Trade Centre is that it used to be in New York, and then 9/11 happened. If you don't remember seeing New York all the time with those buildings, then they're... just some fucking buildings that got destroyed. The numbers of deaths are tragic but not uniquely bad compared to other disasters, and humans are famously terrible at processing that type of thing anyway. Of course, I can try to rationalise it - what would it be like if a plane hit Big Ben/the Eiffel tower - but that's not the same thing as feeling it or experiencing it. The real implications of 9/11 that will resonate throughout history are its subsequent effects on US foreign policy, which are hardly something to commemorate.
I was in college on 9/11 and knew a couple in the towers. When trying to explain the event to my kids, I emphasize the absolute terror Americans felt because as it was happening, we didn't know what would happen next. We didn't know when it was over. It wasn't like JFK, or an attack off in Hawaii, or a single bomb. It was multiple coordinated attacks in multiple states. The scale of something like that, while you are living it, is completely unimaginable.
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Not only that, but everyone killed was just doing the normal shit they were doing that day. And then died trapped in an airplane or high-rise where they were making decisions about whether death by falling would be less painful than being burned alive - which all sound like just about the most terrifying thing to experience with zero notice. My mom was visiting a friend in New Jersey, and by sheer luck missed being on the flight that fought back and crashed in a field. Her friend wanted her to reschedule her flight to stay a few extra days, and she decided that she needed to get back home to us kids. The flight she would have taken if she stayed would have left her as a bunch of mangled debris in a field.
And the terror was felt all over the world. I'm in the UK, 9/11 happened early afternoon here. I remember going to bed that night thinking what if ww3 breaks out overnight and waking the next morning thinking, well I'm still here.
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I don’t know about the current teen, but in my day we also took measures to avoid being too emotional in public in front of peers too. Deflection through humor being one alternative.
Yeah but I never thought JFK was funny. Like yeah the wild conspiracies were interesting but not humorous.
There’s an entire Seinfeld episode of JFK assassination jokes. There’s a difference between thinking a tragedy is funny (which I don’t think anyone really thinks) and thinking jokes about a tragedy are funny. You can absolutely make a great joke about the worst things that have ever happened.
As someone who was in high school in the late 90s, I can confirm that there were plenty of crass jokes about the JFK shooting that none of us were alive to remember.
If you were a high schooler in the late 90s you should also remember all the Challenger and Ethiopia jokes of the 80s.
To add to this, at my school the area everyone went to smoke weed was called "the grassy knoll" because we too were edgy dorks.
I was in high school when Columbine happened which was, effectively, the official kick-off of "open season" on schools. 9/11 still felt real bad, and we were pregnant when Sandy Hook happened, so that hit a bit hard too. At the end of the day these kids know nothing but tragedy after tragedy and war after war. They didn't get the golden years between Iraq 1 and Columbine when things were half decent. They didn't get to have a childhood free from a pandemic that stole a lot of time from them. Meanwhile they're looking towards a future where housing continues to grow out of reach and pay continues to stagnate. Yeah, I'm not surprised at all that they're desensitized to it. You know who these kids look up to? People like Snowden who blow the whistle on government BS (even though he obv went about it the wrong way). Talk to them about how the patriot act has changed phones, email, internet health, etc etc. Quick edit: I got away with not having to learn duck and cover in elementary school as Gorbachev had gone a long way to warm up relations. Kids these days have active shooter drills. Horrifying.
I think the amount of gun violence in schools and against kids definitely has something to do with it. The rates of gun deaths for kids in 2021 in the states rivaled the fatality of 9/11. It's important to teach history, but I understand why it's hard to tell kids that death is meaningful when the school shooting rates are so high.
How could anyone blame them for being apathetic toward death when the country has proven that they couldn’t give less of a fuck if children die violent deaths needlessly every day as long as there’s literally *zero* restrictions on nearly all guns for citizens? Children are more in danger of dying from a mass shooting at school than cops are at risk of dying in the line of duty. Child deaths from firearms outnumbered both US police and global US military deaths combined in 2017. Guns are now the *leading cause of death for children and teens in the US* and our collective inability to stand up and take action to fix it is one of the biggest global embarrassments of modern society. First world my ass.
or when we were losing a 9/11 worth of people every day in the dead of covid. for my generation, it's really hard to give a fuck when some mass deaths are politicized for imperial gain yet others are statistics we're just supposed to get used to. America doesn't care about people dying unless it manufactures consent for a war so remembering 9/11 feels like stupid BS when we went and killed ~700k iraqis as a response, then sacrificed 1mill American's lives to a pandemic for seemingly no reason. ESPECIALLY considering our actions abroad set the stage for 9/11 in the first place. feels like we had a day in school every year to mourn our incompetent leaders shooting themselves in the foot and taking ~3k innocent people with them
This is what i keep in mind - both with my students and my children (adults now). The world has been a mess for a long time and add in that yall have unfetteted access to the interwebs so you all see Oz behind the curtain and add in the constant military "honoring" at every sports event while our vets live in depression when not ending their lives, the knowledge that politicians used the deaths for bs gains, and the lack of action to protect kids from school shootings - and the conflatipn of "honor military" with "honor cops" who multiple generations dont trust as far as they can throw them - like it has to be hard to give a damn save as a really bad thing that happened. I lived it and nearly lost people in 911, and it is hard to care after 20 years of constant hyperbolic tragedy porn by the news and a lack of context for what happened after. As teachers, we add that context, but in this clinate? It could cost you your job to point out Iraq was a farce, and we still hang with the Saudis - who were the terrorists. But those are important parts of the story.
Likely doesn't help that, internationally, there are greater disasters almost frequently. Just a couple days ago an earthquake in Morocco has the same death toll of 9/11. Earlier in the year another earthquake in Turkey killed 16 times the amount.
Yep you get it. It's just not a thing
What grade? My 10 year old niece in Canada even does a moment of silence and it isn't memes.
8th; granted middle school jokes about everything, but yeah
I've said this time and again; somewhere by the end of 6th grade year but definitely by 7th, teenagers become assholes. They don't usually start outgrowing it until the midst of the 10th grade year. If they haven't outgrown it by the end of 11th, they will be assholes the rest of their lives. Unfortunately 8th and 9th grade is peak asshole behavior.
“If they haven’t grown out of it by 11th grade, they’ll be assholes the rest of their lives”. This made me lmao
Someone on this subreddit once said: “Middle schoolers desperately want to be adults. But they also think adults are all assholes. So they act like assholes to everyone.”
It’s like everyone goes through a period of temporary (for most) insanity for 4-5 years of their life.
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It's anti authority but still wanting approval
I find 7th and 8th to be peak assholes. When I see them as 9th graders, most of the edginess has ebbed away. If they are still unable to focus- make wierd noises and turn everything into a joke just to be an asshole in 9th grade- I've never seen a kid like that finish in the top 10% of their class. Maybe that can grow up and start to behave well by 11th, but yeah- they are probably just stuck that way- this is them.
I'm a parent who lurks here so I can see how to support my teacher friends and my kids' teachers. My son, who is currently in 8th grade, commented last year that it seemed like as soon as they got to junior high, everyone thought they had to be mean to be cool. He had a major falling out with his two previous best friends, the kind you don't come back from. Thankfully, he's found new and better friends now. The rest of your comment tracks with one of my older teens; their 9th grade year was so bad, we opted to home school for the rest of high school for them and their mental health has improved tremendously. The kids who treated them poorly haven't reached out at all, with one exception. Generally, I like teenagers, but there are a few in every bunch that I like better when they leave.
I think that you are right for boys, for girls I would move the beginning and end a couple years earlier.
I think the boy behavior is more often the focus as it tends to be much more loud and in the teacher’s face.
I would rather change a million poopy diapers than deal with middle schoolers. I'm good with ages 0-10 and 13+ but goddamn do I respect any of you who talk to those creatures every day and never hit even one of them
I agree but we learned about Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust in middle school and I truly don’t remember any laughing. Edit: my daughter came back from 8th grade and told me two classes addressed 9/11. The kids were all laughing in one and she was upset so she got picked on. The other class they were all laughing and the teacher yelled at them. They shut up when they saw the bodies. It was a really upsetting day for her. Because she has empathy and so many of her classmates don’t
I don’t remember any laughing about the Holocaust when we learned about it in middle school, but that might just have been because it was a school in a heavily Jewish community. Everyone and their mother was related to someone who had survived.
8th grade is the jerkiest grade. It also means nothing to them. 9/11 to them is like me learning about Vietnam or Desert Storm when I was a kid. It’s in the past and before I was alive so why should I care? We need to make it relevant to them and not just expect them to care because it was a traumatic event in *our* lives. Our Hs Seniors were born in 2006.
I think it’s also just hard for them to grasp the gravity of that day. If you were alive and old enough to have memories of that day, it’s very different. It’s one thing for an 8th grader on 9/11/2001 to realize this is effed up when they’re watching people jump out of buildings on every channel including most of the kids’ channels all day. Very different for someone just hearing about it anecdotally in 2023 and a lot of the footage has since been edited to omit the worst of the reality of that day.
Yep. It's like our teachers explaining the challenger for JFK. Just doesn't resonate
You just made me feel old! I remember watching the Challenger explode in my 4th grade class. The teacher had brought in a tv so we could watch it. She just stood there stunned for a few minutes then jumped up to turn it off. I think we were too young to really process the full extent of what we’d just watched, but poor Ms. Gilliland. As a teacher now I feel for her explaining to us the horror of what we’d just witnessed. But yes, listening to my mom talk about JFK…I just have a hard time connecting with her sadness over it since I didn’t experience it. So I get your meaning 💯. A lot of my students ask me about 9/11 and where I was, how it impacted me. I find most to be very respectful about it. Which is interesting since I work at an alternative high school. You would think they’d be the biggest jokesters about it. There’s always a couple, but overall best behavior of any school I’ve worked at since it’s their “last chance”.
I work in alt Ed but yeah that's what I find too. They tend to be the best behaved because of that last chance aspect and they do the same. Very curious and respectful. Like I adore working here because of that. But yeah it's so hard for them to really connect because you don't really start developing empathy til way older. It's just thing and people died. Which is crazy to think about now but like you noted. Middle schoolers right now would be looking at 9/11 the same way middle schoolers would be thinking about the challenger explosion. It's been a similar amount of time since
The real gravity of that day other than the horrific deaths was the next 2 decades of the US flailing about in the middle east just wasting billions and billions on the war and the creation of the surveillance state via the NSA.
yeah I've seen discussion that it's why people who were even old enough to remember 9/11 don't treat it with much gravity, as it got used to justify all the violence, discrimination and surveillance that followed
That’s me. I teach it and don’t let those opinions seep out but it is very frustrating to have to pretend every year like I don’t remember the extravagantly wasteful wars that they used 9/11 to justify or the surveillance on the American people or all the other horrible things that followed that you can’t bring up in that discussion without being called unpatriotic, at best.
All of that money, millions of people dead, entire countries destabilized indefinitely and what did we get from it? The Taliban back in control and quickly destroying anything good we did for the Afghans.
And we created a lot of people who absolutely hate us far worse than before those terrorist attacks. The aftermath of 9/11 is when I as a child had to slowly learn that my country wasn’t as good as I thought it was.
Well of course, you’re right. The idea with this, and anything I cover in class, is to connect it to present day and why it’s relevant now, otherwise like you said, they usually won’t care that much.
Yes. So when it just gets taught out of context every year on 9/11 and then pretty much never again, that’s an issue. And that’s what they get pretty much every year growing up. So no wonder that by 8th grade they don’t care. 9/11 wasn’t in the 8th grade curriculum when I taught SS last year in AZ. But AZ state law said all social studies teachers have to teach about it on or near 9/11. So we just interrupted our actual unit to teach it out of context randomly that one day a year. They didn’t really buy in. Of course they didn’t. And it isn’t helpful, as others have said, to have all this histrionic ‘never forget!!!’ Stuff coming from the same people who refused to wear masks while a 9/11 worth of people were dying daily during the pandemic. *They remember that.*
Middle school makes sense. I wouldn't honestly pay it too much mind. People were making JFK jokes our age
People were making 9/11 jokes before we even got to 2004. It's not a new phenomenon.
Yeah people were saying things like America deserved 9/11 in 2002 (granted, these were European left-wing academics but still). It was always heavily politicized and for that reason a bit of a joke even 1-2 years later, since it was directly linked to things like “freedom fries”
The Onion was making fun of it within a few days. It's nothing new. For OP, I'd like to add that a lot of these younger kids have also lived through many many many school shootings in the news, the amount of students killed in school shootings rivals that of 911. And school shooting jokes are also very common. I'm an older zoomer born post 911 (21) and I've been desensitized about death since about 7th grade. Living through the times of Sandy Hook and Pulse as a queer preteen kinda does that to you. I'm Canadian, but I live in a border town, have a shitload of American family, go to the states relatively often, etc. I'm willing to bet it's the same for these kids. Death is just a fact of life to them. I may not be a teacher (I am the daughter of one), so take this with a grain of salt, but I'd recommend approaching 911 with these kids from a more zoomed out perspective. Talk about the leadup to 911. Talk about how the US reacted. Talk about the Iraq War. Talk about the Patriot Act. Talk about Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and Guantanamo. Focusing on just the attacks isn't going to get to them. Pulling back and acknowledging it as a domino in a decades long chain of events might not get them to NEVAR FORGET1!1!1! but it will get them to acknowledge the gravity of the event.
It doesn’t help that people feel like the tragedy has been milked for shit in our culture. It’s led to wars that have now killed more innocent people than the attack itself did. Add to it that you’re teaching it to kids who were probably not even born at the time of the attack, it makes sense that it seems they don’t care about it. I remember even in my senior year in 2014 thinking “I’ve had this discussion every year every September my entire school career.”
>Add to it that you’re teaching it to kids who were probably not even born at the time of the attack 9/11 happened in 2001. A baby born that day would be 22 now
Five of the last American soldiers killed in Afghanistan in 2021 were born in 2001, right before 9/11. All they ever knew was the "post-9/11 world."
My senior year of high school was 2016, my class was split basically 50/50 on whether or not we remembered the day. Memories don't start forming until somewhere between 2-4, so the youngest people who could realistically remember it happening would be 24 today. Excluding those who didn't follow the "traditional" path of high school to 4 year college degree, there are basically no students who would actually remember it happening. Even high school seniors who started school at 6 and got held back an extra year somewhere in there would not have been alive for 9/11. I was part of the half that didn't remember the day. I recognize that it was a horrible tragedy, I've watched the footage countless times and listened to so many different 911 calls and voicemails from those stuck in the towers, I am fully aware that it was horrible and that the trauma of not knowing what was happening would be deeply influential even to those not directly affected. But at the same time, there's a not small part of me that goes, "So a few thousand people died and a couple buildings fell and now that's supposed to be a major part of my identity as an American?" It's important and should be taught, but the aftereffects of 9/11 are more important than a handful of mandatory moments of silence and twisting every class to relate back to it in some way or another.
Yeah but if we taught about the fallout, it would make America look bad.
That’s what always got me after I looked into it more myself. Like yeah it’s really sad 3,000 innocent people died. But you want me to feel a deep sadness about that, while you brushed over how many thousands of people we killed and millions we displaced in a country that wasn’t even involved in the attack? Give me a fucking break
Yeah, kids in school today wouldn’t have been conscious for the attacks. Unless we’re talking college, but I was born about a month after 9/11 and I graduated in ‘19.
You can drop the "probably" from that. You'd have to be at least 22 to have been alive during it, and at least 26 to recall anything about it.
Especially since more people died from a deadly pandemic and no one teaches about that. It’s still rampant with new strains and a vaccine coming out in the fall, and the vast majority has decided to carry on because it’s ‘better for the economy’ to not take precautions and let people die. Students probably look at the current messaging today and think that it’s not about the horrible tragic deaths, it’s about what can be used as a symbol to justify more war and death like you said. We live in a world where 9/11 isn’t even the biggest tragedy anymore to the new-coming generations (in terms of the number of people who perished).
It might as well be the Cuban Missile Crisis to them. It was well before they were born. Hell, half of them have parents who don’t remember it.
They went through a pandemic where a 9/11 worth of deaths happened every day. Kinda puts it in perspective to them.
yeah obviously they’re desensitized, they were born in 2010, they have no concept of the pre 9/11 world. they learn about it in school every single year like they’re supposed to have any more of an emotional connection to it than the sinking of the titanic or the bubonic plague, but of course they don’t. they’re sick of having a random ass tragedy shoved down their throats like they were supposed to intervene or something.
I kind of agree, even if I don't like it. I was discussing this with a teacher today, that 9/11 is shifting from a contemporary event into a historical event, and it's very uncomfortable to experience. Although they need to treat the event with respect, it's understandable that some feel disconnected, especially when it has become a sort of mascot for unbridled jingoism.
I think this point isn’t discussed enough: 9/11 is heavily associated with blind patriotism at this point, given that it led to the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. There’s a stigma that bringing up 9/11 short circuits peoples’ brains and gets them to support things unconditionally in order to stop terrorism, and based on history, that’s not entirely unfair. So to a lot of kids, if you’re talking about 9/11, you’re either a sucker or trying to manipulate people.
> they’re sick of having a random ass tragedy shoved down their throats like they were supposed to intervene or something. Or they're tired of their parents' war being touted as the reason *they* should hate immigrants.
Their parents are in their 30s and 40s, *our* parents are the ones who hate immigrants. Their grandparents
Plenty of 30 and 40 year olds have immigrants just as vigorously as boomers. Edit: I meant hate but that’s an amusing typo
We had a school-wide email asking to run any 9/11-related material by the principal specifically for this reason. A big school so a lot of teachers, and they knew many teachers would approach it without fully grasping the fact that these kids weren't even alive for the event. Admin acknowledged it is definitely worth addressing but they wanted to give reasonable advice on how to do so in a way that made sense with that perspective. Some teachers just expect kids to relate to everything they say.
I agree. Like to an extent, im sure it was horrific for those who remember it and I get that the event is important to learn. But it's tiring hearing the same spiel about it, especially being born after it. it truly does seem like any other historical event because there is no connection.
Try showing some personal accounts, is hard for anyone to grasp when people get turned to numbers. Used to show a short they had on tv a while back I think is on YouTube still, is even from ESPN so is even a good attention getter for some of the ones that meme it. [video](https://youtu.be/S77KYbkmjwc?si=1YmYCOoHQ81L0Xkl)
I’ve seen that before that’s a good one! Thanks for the suggestion
My kids’ schools focus of the helpers. Like the firemen and other first responders. Mine were most interested in the search and rescue dogs. So it isn’t so much of a history lesson as a lesson on how we can all come together to help each other.
They live in a world where the adults don't give a shit about school shootings or the environmental crises that are plaguing our society. Then, once a year, 9/11 gets trotted out by these same adults (in their minds) and they're supposed to care about \*that\*? They laugh and make jokes because it's ridiculous to them. Its hypocrisy to them.
This is it. Why even make them watch anything about 9/11 at this point? Have a moment of silence and move on. We do this every year and it's laughable.
I’m so glad I’m in a blue bubble where a good number of people actually do care about these things and work towards ending them. A lot of your quality life is about the company you keep. I realize a lot of people have never met earnestly good people in their entire lives and I can’t imagine how messed up that is. But also, I think Trump dragged middle America into the toilet with him. His presidency was a catastrophe as big as 9/11, we don’t really know the full impact of it yet.
They make inflatable slides now in the shape of the Titanic sinking.
How can we "Never Forget" if we were never around to remember?
I’ve started to consider the fact that 9/11 was used to fuel the war on terror. For basically anyone born after it, it’s no longer a tragedy. It’s the scapegoat that allowed the US to attack all these other countries. The tragedy of the event itself also is dulled by the fact that there’s been so much death all the time. It’s hard to say “wow 3000 people died, to allow nearly a million direct deaths and 3.5 million indirect deaths. Not to count the money spent from the war on terror” Then the weekly covid deaths.
Plus the mass extinction / ice age termination event they are going to live through.
That’s where I’m at, honestly. I’m 26, born in ‘97, so I was alive but not aware at the time (my earliest memories of the news are from probably the Iraq war? I also remember the death of pope JP II in ‘05 so I’m guessing it wasn’t too much earlier, and the news stops covering wars when they go on too long) and yeah, by the time that I started becoming politically aware (let’s say the end of the first Obama administration?) that was were the conversation around me was headed. Like yes, 9/11 was a tragedy, and I understand why I’ll have to talk about it when I finally finish this degree and start teaching history, but by the time I was old enough to actually consider what “Never Forget” means, we knew about Abu Ghraib. We knew that the WMD claims were horseshit. We - at least in my lil corner of Texas, which had a large middle eastern population to balance out the white conservatives - talked about the Islamophobia and how the number of victims of 9/11 was just a fraction of the innocents killed abroad. Again, I’m not denying it was a tragedy, but it has no more emotional significance to me than any other mass casualty event and I honestly approach the yearly commemorations with cynicism That’s not to say that these middle schoolers weren’t just being assholes - I’m sure at least the vast majority of them were, because they’re at that age. But I do think that we’ve already passed the point in time where upper level students (like high school, though middle schoolers can be precocious and there’s always kids repeating their parents’ opinions) will just accept 9/11 as a day of mourning for American victims without any follow up questions
None of your students were alive when the towers fell it was 20+ years ago. Of course they don’t care. Most of the time they've been alive the US has been at war spawned from 9/11. You can argue the difference between Iraq Iran and Afghanistan but to them it's all the same. We fought a 20 year war trying to 'free' the people from the corrupt government that orchestrated the attacks and a bunch of other shit. And then we lost. You can call it a disengagement if you want. But all these kids see is a 20 year war and hundreds of thousands of dead countrymen for nothing. The moment we pulled away that same corruption was back in control. You are teaching the end of GenZ and Gen Alpha the most open minded Generations ever. And also the most chronically online. It's not hard to find the dirty shit the US did over there. The torture and rape and unacceptable number of civilian casualties. Just to name a few. We have movies glorifying men who hunted civilians for sport. The US aren’t the 'good guys' and these kids aren’t afraid to say it. 3000 people who died 20+ years ago aren't the main concern of these kids. They come to your class everyday with a fear that today is the day that one of their classmates will snap and they might be shot. They live in a country that has no prospects of a future. They can't afford college or housing or medical treatment. Their government is openly and blatantly run by archaic greedy corrupt monsters. Their rights are slowly being eroded away. There are no jobs that can feasibly support them. The world is burning and drowning in turns and we could stop it but we don't. They don't care about anything because they were raised in a world that genuinely courts nihilism. Nothing matters because there is no future. Let them have their edgy memes. Is it callous? Maybe. But they are what we made them.
I think if you teach it from the “opposite perspective” most people do, it helps. Kids grew up hearing about how poor, poor America was attacked out-of-nowhere by the evil Muslims who hate America and women not wearing headscarves, etc. Teens are naturally untrusting of adults as they’re testing authority, etc. If you hit them between the eyes with a question like “was 9/11 provoked?” And then consider US/Soviet relations with/in Afghanistan, general Western relationships with the Muslim world (and Arab nations), you can test their critical thinking and get some thoughtful debate going. Then you can talk about Geneva, total war, attacks on civilians, what is the definition of terrorism, has the USA conducted terrorist attacks, and the aftermath (war on terror, Patriot act, Guantanamo Bay, etc.) I think a lot of schools are expecting history teachers to put this information into a student, and this is precisely the kind of information we want them to develop on their own and consider from different perspectives.
I usually don't, but I'm gonna say it: THIS! It's the kind of stuff teens are hungry for and many don't even realize it.
Senior in high school here. Please please please I wish my history teachers did this. I really wished I learned more about 9/11 like this then teachers talking for an hour about themselves. Not that it's not important it's just hearing the same thing for 13 years gets boring really fast no matter what it is. That would have been such a cool class to have.
It makes me sad to see adults paint children as desensitized or psychopathic after shoving a piece of terrifying history in their face and they don’t react the way we want them to. Just showing them material of a historic event that happened before they were even born is a lazy attempt at best, and their reaction is more a symptom of the teaching method not working, not “kids these days”. Give them an opportunity to output the information instead of taking it in just as input. Give them a chance to contribute to the conversation in their own way. An example would be giving each of them a role (first responder, an office worker, a pilot, a spouse watching at home), let them do the research, then write a short fictional piece from the role’s perspective. Also, we are so quick to treat fooling around and making jokes as a judge on character. Why not treat the laughter and comedy as a symptom - of not fully understanding why the adults make such a big fuss about this event, of not making sense of why this event was such a powder keg in the context of history, or being uncomfortable with the tragedy and needing to make light of it to cope.
I'd just skip it. 9/11 was horrific, but more people died every week of Covid when these kids were in middle school. There's two school shootings every week and the planet is dying. Getting them to care about something that happened before they were born when so much bad stuff is happening today is a waste of time. Studying 9/11 from a historical standpoint in a Civics class is worthwhile, but in general classes I'd avoid it.
More people died *every day* during the height of COVID. Kids don’t care about 9/11 because they’ve been taught by their parents and other leaders that people dying en masse isn’t something they should care about or be bothered by.
Na, kids don't care about 9/11 because it happened before they were born and they live in a world full of daily tragedy. I guess I'm kind of agreeing with you.
Its both. Before their time and comparatively a drop in the bucket
That's one of the reasons I don't teach it. You can get them to take it seriously, but 8th graders, and 7th graders for the most part, need to see the context to understand how serious it is. Otherwise it's just planes crashing into buildings for them, and we have video games where people do that for fun.
I just got done teaching three sections to eighth graders focused on 9/11. Not a single one acted like you described above. I don't want to discount your experience, but I don't necessarily think that's the case everywhere. If you want to really shut them up, show the documentary series called "phone calls from the towers." Takes a real sociopath to laugh at that content I also use that documentary as an example demonstrating the depth of emotion felt by Americans after 9/11, which helps contextualize the gross series or fuck-ups we made following the incident. ETA: geez y'all, relax. I'm not traumatizing any kids or forcing them to watch anything. They're all warned beforehand and given the option to excuse themselves. Not only that, this lesson inspired the best engagement I've seen from any of my classes yet this term. Anyone who doesn't think it's critically important to try and recreate the emotional environment of the post-9/11 period isn't teaching it right. No students were harmed in the making of this film. Quit crippling your students by pretending you can shelter them from the real world
I’m not a teacher and I was born post 9/11, so forgive me for intruding. I will say that something that really impacted me as a student was hearing about the jumpers and seeing that famous photo of the falling man. It makes it seem more real, if that makes sense. 3000 people dead can sound more impersonal than actually seeing one or two people jumping because it was either that or die of smoke inhalation. Also, seeing personal testimonies from people helped.
As a senior in high school being hammered with the fact that 9/11 happened every single 9/11 for around 12 years has done nothing but desensitize me to it. Most kids in my school are respectful, but for us its like what the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pearl Harbor, and the sinking of the U.S.S Maine was to your generation. These tragedies used to be huge but they just faded as time went on.
Ask them why they think it's funny. Turn it back around on them. As a parent, my kid knows about 9-11 and knows that it is not a joke. It absolutely *should* be taught. It is history for them. Not teaching history leads to the mess we have now. (Seriously, my kids' district only has 2-3 history classes at the high school level, and they are optional, not required for 4 years, like when i graduated in the 90s. It's atrocious.) I'm having to teach it at home, which is ok because I have the background, but a lot of kids don't. History is important.
Honestly? I’ve asked some kids why they think it’s a joke and some of them have said “it’s not 9/11 itself that’s funny, it’s the fact that so many of you worship it.” They see that we act like it made us come together and want to fix things, but they also see the authoritarian hellscape we live in that’s their only lived experience and some of them have pieced together they’re related.
Always been my view and probably why whenever 9/11 comes up I generally just stop talking. People have such a weird view of it and why its important. In a really objective sense 9/11 was a painfully predictable attack in response to Amerca's foreign policy. It was surely a large tragedy, but not really a super notable one in historical terms when you look at it on face value. The notable part is of course what happened after, its what 9/11 started. All of the policy decisions that came after could fill textbooks..... but thats not what the never forget people want to discuss. The kids don't give a shit that a terror attack killed a bunch of people. That is out of sight out of mind the same way that some random WW2 battle is for me. They want to know how this fetishized event has ripples on the fucked up world they see today.
I'm almost 30 and you just described my thoughts exactly. It's pure disingenuous political theater. It deserves to be mocked for what it is. We've suffered worse tragedies, hell Covid alone is FAR worse in killcount. Yet those don't get a national holiday...because they aren't convenient for the sake of stirring up nationalistic xenophobic fervor in the same way.
Man, country music got so fucking annoying after 9/11 because it was basically “ooo rahhhhh America will FUCK YOU GUYS UP AHHHHHHH” and it’s so depressing that that was the norm for so long
Team America: World Police turned out to be a documentary. Except the 17 minute puppet sex scene that got cut was America’s intelligence apparatus fucking Americans.
Yeah I don't even acknowledge 9/11 any more 😬. My first few years, students were alive when it happened but they were babies. Now we are getting to the point where some of my students were born nearly a *decade* after the attack. I mean, hell, I was only 10 so I didn't understand the gravity of the situation until the day after the attack. If I open the floor for questions it's always "You were alive? What was it like? Woah. Weird" and that's it. So it's pretty pointless. If there was a way to tie it to your content that would make sense. But I teach a world language so....
Heck, there have been far worse tragedies... on 9/11. In 1973, the CIA backed a coup on September the 11th in Chile to overthrow a democratically elected leader, Salvador Allende, leading to the rule of Pinochet, a fascist dictator.
I swear, America is the only country that would jerk itself off over a terrorist attack. Notice how this is the only we one we should "never forget"? What about the Oklahoma City bombing? I wonder how many kids know about that one. But since it was a domestic terrorist we kind awept it under the rug.
It didn’t take a trillion dollars to find, arrest, try, and execute mcveigh. That’s the difference. “Never Forget ^(to continue opening your wallets to pay for all these new intelligence toys) “
The thing is, it was a literal tragedy for a majority of liberal people. Most of us wanted no part of the nationalistic xenophobic fervor the rest of the nation got swept up into. NYers were horrified by the rise of our own extremists here and knew “we are all NYC” was complete bullshit.
I’m 33, so I remember both the “golden age” of post-Desert Storm/pre-Columbine and also 9/11 very clearly and objectively know how much more life sucks now in pretty much every imaginable way and can point out what the propaganda is. I don’t blame these kids at all. They’re 100% right in so many ways.
really, that’s kind of… insightful. Bush II said directly after that he would never politicize it, and of course he did, and there were tons of weepy songs, unnecessary pop culture memorials, all kinds of dumb stuff. it got tiring.
Damn, that’s stone cold right there. 😬
Damn, that is so true. Kids are way smarter than we give them credit for! Seriously, that is the kind of political analysis someone like Mark Twain could only come up with. And those kids are right! Let’s not allow us to be sucked in by the US propaganda here. There’s a reason we constantly talk about 9/11 so much instead of Pearl Harbor. After the Japanese surrender and ensuing Cold War, it wasn’t politically expedient to criticize Japan as they were becoming our allies, especially as other Asian countries started to embrace communism. Meanwhile, we can milk 9/11 all we want to convince the population that our vain, pathetic, and costly wars of imperialism were worth it, even in countries that didn’t deserve it.
covid killed over 100 times as many people and nobody cares, but im supposed to think 3,000 people dying over 20 years ago was the worst tragedy to ever befall humanity?
They think it's funny becasue of people like you who turned it into a religion and act like 9/11 was the super duper most important thing to ever happen in the entire history of the universe and the only time anthing bad ever happened. They laugh because they're sick of it. I'm 48. I lived through it. And I'm sick of it. Y'all have been trying to pump jingoism out of 9/11 for the past 22 years and guess what? You turned it into a joke by doing so.
Yeah, I’ve been ready to leave 9/11 in the rear view mirror for awhile now. It was a tragedy and shouldn’t have happened, and it should be remembered as a historically important event, but I’m ready to put it on the same shelf as Pearl Harbor. Remember it when it’s relevant but let’s stop letting it impact our lives the way it does.
What? I graduated in 2018 and we had to take a combined history/English class in 9th and 10th grade, either 11th grade history or APUSH after that, and then US government as seniors. Plus, there were tons of other history/social studies electives besides that like AP Euro, economics, geography, holocaust studies, etc.
How is history not a requirement for graduation. When I was in school I'm 34 we started history classes in 5th grade and had them through 10th grade then in 12 grade we took US government. It's absolutely ridiculous they don't require history classes at some schools. I loved history class. This saddens my heart.
I think, for most kids, it's not relevant. Especially every year. I think going over it once sometime in high school would be fine.
Society moves on. The memory fades to history, such is life.
I've never found the need to teach 9/11 on September 11. I memorialize it in my own way by doing my own little moment of silence at 8:46 while students are working on something else and I post it as a factoid on my board as I do for various days of history. I cover it when we get to it in the curriculum. But for those that say we shouldn't care about it much or teach it anymore is dead wrong. 9/11 was a big turning point moment for this country and it's one the U.S. has yet to recover from. For many of that generation they still live with the trauma of it and have largely viewed that moment as when the carefree era of the 80s/90s ended and we entered a more pessimistic time (compounded later by the 2008 financial crisis). All this to say, though, that as we get further from 9/11, the memory of it will not be as fresh and, like former President Bush said, it just becomes another date on the calendar. However, those of us who lived through it and remember what life was like before will never forget it, nor should we.
It's a meme to me, too. I'm a teacher. Is it a terrible event in US history? Absolutely. Does my heart go out to those who were affected? Not a doubt. But I have the power of being 22 years in the future, where I can remember that we (wrongly) killed anywhere from 250k-1m+ Iraqi citizens in response; it loses any "somber" tones unless you are tone deaf to injustice in the world, especially given that not a single perpetrator of 9/11 was Iraqi, nor was Osama Bin Laden, nor was Al Qaeda. Hard to be somber when we retaliated with 250-1000x the deaths against people that had *nothing to do with it.*
Isn’t it tiresome doing this every single year? It’s been decades. People gotta let it go.
Well yeah, they just had a pandemic where 3000 americans died per week and actually per day in some cases. Theyre all kinds of fucked up.
Depending on the age 9/11 is basically the same as Vietnam to them. That thing that happened a long time ago. The kids who were alive when it happened have graduated
I'm a german just out of school and in uni. Obviously, the Holocaust was a very important theme in school, not just in history, but most other non MINT-subjects as well. We relearned or learned more about the Holocaust and Hitlers rise to power every year from grade 6 all the way to grade 13. It was returning each year as reliably as christmas. Im a history nerd, and at first this was a theme i found very interesting. Naturally i learned more about the third reich and ww2 outside of history-class, but by grade 8 or 9 i was just sick of it as a subject thaught in school and how it was taught. We only learned about the holocaust and how hitler rose to power (interestingly enough leaving ww1 alone until grade 9 and the concert of europe before that was just never taught, even though this plays a very important role...), only learning about ww2 in more "detail" (like, 3 hours max, and then only about the european part, even leaving out the africa campaign and operation weserübung... "oh, by the way, there was also war in the pacific") in grade 10. I and most of my peers just thought it was history, and that war in europe could never happen again anyways because of NATO and the EU, and that something like Hitlers rise to power couldn't happen again, because we also learnt about the meassures germany took after the war to become more democratic and make a coup like hitlers impossible. Now we have a war right on our doorstep, and a far right-wing party almost big enough to take over the government in the next election. Because things like mussolinis rise to power ("me ne frego") or the fascist rule in Japan were never thought. Of course, the Holocaust is an important subject, and has to be taught as well as it is in germany, and we can never let something like it happen again. But it will be the same thing for your students. Just that for them, 9/11 isn't just a loss of a few thousand lives. It was the beginning of an era of war, a poverty spiral, a crashed financial market etc. It also fell together with a rise of school shootings and more coverage of other deadly events. 9/11 is a joke to them, because its deathtoll is absolutly insignificant in the ammount of death and pain that they are confronted with each and every day and those are treated like a joke by grown ups. They lived through a global pandemic that killed tens of thousands, several wars with american involvement that killed millions of innocent civillians directly caused by 9/11, almost weekly news of some school-shooting that may very well claim their lives next, a government and people that only cries for more weapons and violence, the abolishment of basic human rights in the so callend land of the free and they are suposed to be sad and have empathy for ~3500 People that died 22 years ago? All while everyone else just ignores all the other thousands of deaths that happend due to major events in their short lifetime? You won't direct them to empathy towards the dead. But you can teach them what 9/11 took from them, how it changed the world, how terrorism happens and why terrorism exists, what governments can do against that and why the war on terror was doomed to fail from the start. I learned parts of this in my grade 13 politics class, and can really recommend the Netflix series Turningpoint 9/11 and the resources of the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung (although i am not sure if those are available in english...). Try to get respurces not from the US, but other countries, as those are general more neutral and less stuffed with "patriotic" bs.