Never Forget to Always Remember...
Greetings, Indiana English teachers.
Just as pretty much every email has begun for the last year, on behalf of the ICTE Executive Board, I hope this message finds you well.
This month, we likely find ourselves very much already in the thick of it, so to speak. Still contact tracing, still asking kids to pull up their masks, still wondering, wandering, worrying, hoping, and trying to carve out those brief moments of peace from the consistently brutal, beautiful chaos of our days. We’re still teaching, of course. Still doing our best to do the good well. We’re all still here.
This month, though, many of us also recall the events of September 11th, 2001. As the twentieth anniversary of the attacks fell upon us not more than two weeks ago, I’m humbled by the increasingly poignant reminder that 9/11, quite simply, will always mean different things to everyone.
It took about a decade, sure, but sometime around 2013 or 2014, the day we all vowed to Never Forget inevitably evolved into something that so many of our students just couldn’t remember.
Some of us were teaching that Tuesday morning, perhaps in the infancy of our careers, and can recall vividly getting emails from secretaries or colleagues with vague but insistent pleas to turn the TV on and “watch!”
Many of us were students ourselves that September and have spent the last two decades preserving that day in our childhood pasts, calcifying it, perhaps, as the singular moment when our youth effectively ended and the jarring realities of adulthood sunk in.
Others of us, still, were too young to remember anything about when the Towers fell and have instead spent nearly the entirety of our lives forging stark but artificial impressions of the event from the recollections and narratives of others. We’ve pieced together meanings from the footage of anchors we’ve never seen and the voices of heroes we’ve only met in dreams.
And, of course, it won’t be long before Indiana’s English teachers will speak uniformly and eternally of 9/11 as something that happened before they were born.
Our students, of course, are already there.
And so this September, as we once again find ourselves mired in a moment that will define, in some capacity, our careers and lives beyond booster shots and mask mandates, I find myself returning to those Never Forget posters that have ironically been collecting dust in my attic for over twenty years.
Is never forgetting the same as remembering? As a language lover, I’m drawn to this tension. The absence of action (not doing something) versus the presence of agency (remember!)
What does it mean to not forget? What does it take to remember? What do each of these demand? What do they risk? What do they cost?
In keeping with this year’s mission to reignite our passion for our profession and promote a spirit of community and collaboration among all Indiana English teachers, practicing and preservice alike, this month’s newsletter explores the concepts of comfort, memory, and nostalgia a bit further. Indeed, many of us have spent at least a portion of this month considering the tragedies of the past, while anticipating the struggles of years to come. Yet as we all continue negotiating the complexities of our present moment, we might also be considering the elements of our current struggles that we may not necessarily want to remember, but know we’ll never forget.
What stories will we tell about our Now? How has it changed us, yes, and how will we continue to evolve? To mutate. To form variants of ourselves as teachers, people? What will we take with us, and what will it mean when our masks can finally start collecting dust in our attics, just like those posters we made after the attacks?
Our future students will only know of Covid as a series of stories, and of us as characters therein. As the action and conflicts of our narrative continue to rise, how can we maintain our dynamism, our humanity? How are we avoiding stagnation? What ignites us, offers comfort, illuminates our purpose and path? Because the exposition’s over, and we’re all still here.
We’ve also been here before.
Thank you, teachers, for everything you do and all that you are.