On Explaining Tragedy

In other words, a second grade teacher's guide to explaining 9/11.   

This morning when I walked into class, my teacher said, "the math lesson is ready, right?  And you're ready to explain 9/11 to the children?"  Uh, what?


I'm student teaching on the west coast, but I grew up in Southwestern Ohio (should "southwestern" be capitalized?).  On the morning of the attack on the twin towers and pentagon, I was in my seventh grade history class when the principal asked teachers to turn on the televisions over the intercom.  I didn't really understand what was happening, but I was pretty nervous when people started spreading the possibility of random attacks on towns throughout the U.S.  You know, the corn fields of Morrow are an obvious target...  Anyway, I started to really understand when I went to Papaw's house and tried watching TRL, but instead found only 9/11 coverage/tributes.  

I have heard from my friend that grew up in California that 9/11 wasn't as scary for him because of location and awareness.  A lot of his classmates weren't in the loop immediately about 9/11 because they hadn't watched the news before leaving for school.  In his experience, Northern Californians were a little nervous that San Francisco was a potential target.

Given my different experience with 9/11 (considering my teacher was an adult at the time of the attack), I really didn't think I would be an appropriate candidate for explaining 9/11.  Did I mention she didn't want me to really talk about the terrorist attack/death aspect of the events?  Don't get me wrong, as a teacher, no matter my background I should be able to represent an unbiased view of historical events, but having no time to research appropriate presentation methods along with NO IDEA HOW TO SPEAK ABOUT TRAGEDY to students who are seven or eight year olds...  I just think that this would have been a great "modeling" opportunity for my lead teacher.

So what did I do?  I illegally hopped on the computer and researched "9/11 for kids."  The best link that I found was a link to watch the Nickelodeon video "What Happened? The Story of September 11, 2001" which I watched a little bit of.  I have to say it's pretty good, so you should check it out.  Unfortunately, a twenty minute video is unacceptable for a brief discussion (there was no extra time allotted for this discussion, thank you) so I wrote down a few tidbits by watching the beginning and end.  I started out by asking students if they knew what day it was ("Tuesday!").  I then explained that it was 9/11 (a.k.a. Patriot Day, if you haven't heard) and asked if they knew what 9/11 was ("it's when the war started and the soldiers went away to fight!").  Eventually, I explained the Twin Towers, terrorists, and the memorial.  Then I explained that it is important to remember events like this because we want to come together as a community to protect each other.  We "remembered" 9/11 by singing Grand Old Flag, Star Spangled Banner, Yankee Doodle Boy, This Land is Your Land, and God Bless America.  We didn't really have much of a discussion, now that I think back on this morning, it was more like an "info session."  Even though some students do not eat breakfast before school, at least they had a large helping of American patriotism to start their day!

Next time, I'll definitely take care to come up with more of a discussion and structure some in-depth understanding- I'm sure there is at least ONE picture book out there explaining 9/11... (September 11, 2001: Then and Now, A Place of Remembrance: Official Book of the National September 11 Memorial... Sorry they're all informational, I can't find any "cheap" picture books)