September 11, 2008
It is my eldest brother's birthday, and he's a retired NYFD Captain.
Big fires always get my attention, and in 2001 when I saw the great plumes of smoke rising from downtown, I knew he was safe because he'd taken the day off. After I learned the malicious gravity of the attacks, I worried after my sister and her husband who worked on Lower Broadway, and for my nephew who flew frequently out of Boston on business.
Gratefully, my family suffered no deaths.
I had been in the Trade Center a few weeks prior, and like many New Yorkers, my attachment to the space was and is palpable.
My Dad was a Steamfitter and worked on the initial construction, and later helped fix the buildings with the sprinklers that could not contain the devastation, could not quell the flaming jet fuel, decades later. He got me a job there when I was an undergraduate at Fordham in the early 1980's. I worked night shifts in the South Tower as a Mason Tender. On my desk at home I've got a concrete cylinder cut from the floor of the WTC, a three inch core left behind in a utility closet by a plumber or electrician. I took it home to serve as a paperweight, not knowing the value it would acquire as an artifact, as a museum piece. Earlier, during a high school summer, I was downtown working as a Porter across the street at One Liberty Plaza when that guy scaled the North Tower.
I missed Petit and the tightrope, and always regretted that.
I wonder how to mark this day, this anniversary, am frankly uncertain as a New York City public school principal how to honor it. Our students were quite young the morning of the attacks, my oldest students were but seven year-olds and my youngest have no memory of that surreal day.
I am reluctant to call assembly, to make leaden announcements, to try to evoke an emotional response for an event which does seem to have much of an impact on my kids. I don't want to inflict my own response to the attacks onto my students.
I worry that I am not properly signifying the importance of the loss of that day, of failing to give my students access to what caused a real change in the United States. The consequences of the grief engendered that morning still inform policy and still serve to justify much in the sacrifice of human lives, in economic investment.
I worry not so much about offending my Muslim students, as of placing them in a position where gross prejudice might compromise and make harsher their already tenuous place in this society.
I worry that death on a massive scale has since visited the people of Southwest Asia, and their lives are as important as those of our neighbors murdered on 9/11. There are far more dead Iraqis and Afghanis today than New Yorkers who perished on September 11th. How to honor these dead as well? How to teach that a direct consequence of the dead in NYC is the dead of Baghdad?
I worry that this is severe language. Bloodletting is harsh. And the history of these lost lives --how does one teach it well?
We teach the War of 1812, it is far away. We struggle more I think to mark the losses in Darfur because the loss is so fresh, is immediate. We must look for ways to open our students' minds to the tragedies of the world, to gain for them a sense of justice and a generosity of spirit, to develop their identities as citizens of this nation and members of the world community.
This must be taught. And taught well.
I spent the morning of September 11th as principal of a Catholic school in Brooklyn, having assumed the lead just one week prior. I watched the Towers burning from a perch on the roof of the school, and would go back and forth to the television in the office, then to classes, finally deciding to bring the student body into our church. By the height of day the sky was bluntly split, above and to the north it was a striking blue. At the southern horizon the steady wind carried the holocaust over that third of the sky, the air a color I'd never seen before, black to grey, opaque with tons of matter flung aloft in the flames, the fruit of the collapses.
People began to pass on Ocean Avenue having walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, besmirched and ash covered. Late in the afternoon, papers fell from the sky, odd computer sheets burned at the edges, frayed, themselves ashen. Silently they fell to the lawn of the school and I collected them.
As I drove home to the Bronx over the Whitestone Bridge, that day and for weeks later, the pile smouldered. The TBTA cops waved the cars through, their other hands cradling semiautomatic weapons, and no tolls were paid that early evening.
How to teach such things?
Big fires always get my attention, and in 2001 when I saw the great plumes of smoke rising from downtown, I knew he was safe because he'd taken the day off. After I learned the malicious gravity of the attacks, I worried after my sister and her husband who worked on Lower Broadway, and for my nephew who flew frequently out of Boston on business.
Gratefully, my family suffered no deaths.
I had been in the Trade Center a few weeks prior, and like many New Yorkers, my attachment to the space was and is palpable.
My Dad was a Steamfitter and worked on the initial construction, and later helped fix the buildings with the sprinklers that could not contain the devastation, could not quell the flaming jet fuel, decades later. He got me a job there when I was an undergraduate at Fordham in the early 1980's. I worked night shifts in the South Tower as a Mason Tender. On my desk at home I've got a concrete cylinder cut from the floor of the WTC, a three inch core left behind in a utility closet by a plumber or electrician. I took it home to serve as a paperweight, not knowing the value it would acquire as an artifact, as a museum piece. Earlier, during a high school summer, I was downtown working as a Porter across the street at One Liberty Plaza when that guy scaled the North Tower.
I missed Petit and the tightrope, and always regretted that.
I wonder how to mark this day, this anniversary, am frankly uncertain as a New York City public school principal how to honor it. Our students were quite young the morning of the attacks, my oldest students were but seven year-olds and my youngest have no memory of that surreal day.
I am reluctant to call assembly, to make leaden announcements, to try to evoke an emotional response for an event which does seem to have much of an impact on my kids. I don't want to inflict my own response to the attacks onto my students.
I worry that I am not properly signifying the importance of the loss of that day, of failing to give my students access to what caused a real change in the United States. The consequences of the grief engendered that morning still inform policy and still serve to justify much in the sacrifice of human lives, in economic investment.
I worry not so much about offending my Muslim students, as of placing them in a position where gross prejudice might compromise and make harsher their already tenuous place in this society.
I worry that death on a massive scale has since visited the people of Southwest Asia, and their lives are as important as those of our neighbors murdered on 9/11. There are far more dead Iraqis and Afghanis today than New Yorkers who perished on September 11th. How to honor these dead as well? How to teach that a direct consequence of the dead in NYC is the dead of Baghdad?
I worry that this is severe language. Bloodletting is harsh. And the history of these lost lives --how does one teach it well?
We teach the War of 1812, it is far away. We struggle more I think to mark the losses in Darfur because the loss is so fresh, is immediate. We must look for ways to open our students' minds to the tragedies of the world, to gain for them a sense of justice and a generosity of spirit, to develop their identities as citizens of this nation and members of the world community.
This must be taught. And taught well.
I spent the morning of September 11th as principal of a Catholic school in Brooklyn, having assumed the lead just one week prior. I watched the Towers burning from a perch on the roof of the school, and would go back and forth to the television in the office, then to classes, finally deciding to bring the student body into our church. By the height of day the sky was bluntly split, above and to the north it was a striking blue. At the southern horizon the steady wind carried the holocaust over that third of the sky, the air a color I'd never seen before, black to grey, opaque with tons of matter flung aloft in the flames, the fruit of the collapses.
People began to pass on Ocean Avenue having walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, besmirched and ash covered. Late in the afternoon, papers fell from the sky, odd computer sheets burned at the edges, frayed, themselves ashen. Silently they fell to the lawn of the school and I collected them.
As I drove home to the Bronx over the Whitestone Bridge, that day and for weeks later, the pile smouldered. The TBTA cops waved the cars through, their other hands cradling semiautomatic weapons, and no tolls were paid that early evening.
How to teach such things?
posted by P. F. Kelly @ 4:35 PM
1 Comments
