They knew of it only as a number or from reading about it. Last year’s freshmen were not yet a year old on September 11, 2001. Last year, when I asked the question, I found myself a bit in shock at the response. I was recounting a history they didn’t wholly remember. “I was sure I saw it that day,” another student said, “but now that we’re talking about it, I honestly don’t know.” When I recounted my own story of watching the events unfold from Brooklyn and then Manhattan that day, as I found myself doing each fall, they listened more intently than past students had. One student was certain her third-grade teacher made a point of not showing them the smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center towers. If pushed, they had to admit they didn’t know if they remembered watching news footage of the attacks that day or if their memory was of seeing that footage over and over years later.

Now freshmen described a glimpse of a memory of a third-grade teacher attempting to figure out how to talk as events unfolded. The eternity of waiting.įive years later, the discussion was different. They recounted with visceral detail how it felt not to know until late that day if their parents were okay.

Students from Manhattan and Brooklyn had parents who’d worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. I’ve been teaching college students for the past decade or so, and every year, I pose the same question to my freshmen: Where were you on September 11, 2001? My first year of teaching a freshman writing seminar, the question led to a disarming conversation about how their eighth-grade teachers handled the news.

Boomer1 by daniel torday