How Sonoma County teachers instruct the post-9/11 generation to ‘never forget’
Nick Perrone had just turned 20 on Sept. 11, 2001 and was sleeping in when he suddenly awoke to a call from his mom.
“Turn on the television, I'm coming home,” she said, leaving her job at an Orange County grocery store.
On the television, like most Americans, he couldn’t fathom what he saw.
After the al-Qaida terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and changed history, Perrone’s biggest question was: “Why did this happen?” His search for answers led him to study history, and he now teaches the subject at Santa Rosa Junior College.
A decade ago, at the front of the class at a different junior college, he began his lesson with, “Well, we all remember what happened on 9/11.” To his astonishment, the students shook their heads. No, they did not remember.
Perrone is among the legions of history and social studies teachers across the nation grappling with how to instruct students with evermore distant ties to the worst terrorist attacks on American soil. Many in Perrone’s class had not even been born by that time. But they have grown up in a country at war and witnessed recent reports of the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Teachers are confronting students’ generational distance from the attacks and the warp of social media and conspiracy theories that have sprung up around them, as well as the political complexity of America’s war on terror and poor record of nation building.
Sonoma County teachers say they’ve crafted their lessons on 9/11 to focus on the history behind, during and after the terrorist attacks, so that the younger generation can understand how the events shaped world history.
“That whole history of why did we go to Iraq and Afghanistan, why has it dragged on … A lot of students don’t have that background information,” said Johannes Van Gorp, a history instructor at SRJC.
Van Gorp noted the younger generation is grappling with a historic global pandemic and resulting economic crisis, so for them, “September 11 is more of an abstract concept.”
Thomas Warf, an 11th grade U.S. history teacher at Healdsburg High School, takes an approach similar to Perrone’s, providing students with primary sources and facilitating a discussion so they can, “connect it to current events and what's happening now.”
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, about 20 of Warf’s students were engaged in a reading exercise about 9/11. Warf asked the students if they had any questions and they urged him to share his personal story. He was in college, he told them, and woke up with the news on television. Then he was in shock.
The lesson unfolded in a lecture, an assignment and clips from a documentary detailing U.S. involvement in Afghanistan during the Cold War a decade before the attacks.
Watching footage from the collapse of the south tower, students became suddenly attentive, sitting on the edge of their chairs with wide eyes. Some even gasped at footage of New Yorkers running from the giant dust cloud after the tower collapsed.
“I really feel like I have more sympathy after seeing those videos,” said Viola Santana, 15.
Earlier she had been teased by her classmates for not knowing who al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden was. Others shared that they also hadn’t known much about him either―or the back story of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the attack on the Pentagon and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
“Before this, I knew [9/11] was important, but now I see how much it changed the entire U.S.,” Santana said.
Citlaly Rosilla, 16, said the lesson opened her eyes to the violent and complex history leading up to the attacks.
“I knew who was behind [the attacks] but I didn’t know what was going on, why they did that and their reasons for it,” Rosilla said.
Students in Bella Barclay's eighth grade history class at Healdsburg Junior High School were all born about seven years after the 2001 attacks.
“I knew the twin towers collapsed, but I didn’t know what had happened until Ms. Barclay told me about it,” said Lilianna Reyes.
Reyes and some of her classmates completed an extra credit assignment that Barclay offers every year about the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath. The students each interviewed a person who bore witness to or survived the attacks, asking them how both they and the country changed.
Sia Huebel interviewed her half-sister's grandfather, who worked in one of the World Trade Center towers, she said. Growing up, Huebel said she remembers her family telling the story of how the grandfather happened to call in sick that day, which the rest of the family learned only after hours of frantic phone calls.