by Lee Douma
28th Year of Teaching
It was ISTEP day, so half of my study-hall students were filling bubbles in the gym. I was enjoying the fact that I had passed my own test. One month into the school year, the students had completed their examination of this outsider and determined that he wasn’t the clueless, manipulable newbie they’d hoped he would be. Every high school student in the study hall was working, or at least faking convincingly.
Establishing yourself when you’re a new arrival in a small, rural town is tough, especially when you have a Michigan accent and “you talk like a schoolteacher.” People are wary. Some assume you have a superiority complex. My family and I had moved from a few hours away in northern Indiana to occupy my wife’s grandparent’s 1800s farmhouse after Grandma Mimi moved into a nursing home. We were glad to be there, but it was still an incredibly stressful time. The construction workers were there every day, so we needed to keep our one-year-old daughter and three-year-old son out of their way. My wife was paving the first inroads of local social connection through her involvement in Mothers of Preschoolers. Other than a few MOPS, an uncle and aunt, and a couple older cousins, we knew nobody in the area.
On this particular Tuesday morning, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue was drifting through my beige Altec-Lansing speakers as the students worked and I graded papers. An email notification popped up on my screen. The message was from a social studies teacher just down the hall. He said that something was happening in New York and we might want to turn on our TVs if we weren’t doing anything urgent.
I turned on the TV to find Katie Couric and Matt Lauer explaining that a plane had accidentally crashed into one of the World Trade Towers. They were unsure about the details, but there was speculation about air-traffic-control problems. Most of my students found it interesting enough to look up from their work, but it was just another distant news event. Live video of the smoking building was on the split screen as Couric and Lauer interviewed an eyewitness, trying to piece together an explanation of what had happened.
Then the eyewitness gasped. There had been another explosion, she said. She asked if Couric and Lauer could confirm that. A clip from a different camera angle made it clear that the second tower had been hit by another plane.
The word palpable was in our vocabulary book that year. The moment of the second plane’s impact would become my example for that word for the rest of my career. As the profound significance of the moment washed over the room, the image that came to my mind was of an animated graphic in a documentary film: The moving image of our classroom full of shocked faces froze into a still snapshot. Then I imagined the camera zooming out quickly to show that snapshot shrinking down and taking its place on a timeline of pivotal moments in U.S. history: the shots at Lexington and Concord, the attack on Fort Sumpter, and the bombing of Pearl-Harbor.
An attack on American soil. An attack by outsiders on a heavily populated area of the continental US. Thousands of civilians killed. This kind of thing just didn’t happen.
Instantaneously, viscerally, I knew that the nation had just entered an era that would be defined by a sense of vulnerability and wariness. The realization that we were susceptible to attack would for months afterward lead us to wonder if a terror cell might plant a bomb under the bleachers at a small-town football game. It would for years afterward lead us to wonder if we were safe in the air and near our biggest cities. It would for two decades afterward lead us to keep troops in Afghanistan.
Also palpable, as we all know, was the sense of unity and connectedness among Americans. Sometimes I wonder if we exaggerate that sense of unity due to a naive sense of nostalgia. I don’t think we do. I believe there really was a tangible and surreal sense of tribal oneness--a shared intuition that we were all ready to step up if danger were to make its way even closer to our homes. I have no desire to relive the fear and uncertainty of 9/11, but I can’t think of much that we need more than a return to the spirit of Sept. 12.
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