Lesson Planning

In case you haven't heard, tomorrow is the five year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Social Studies teachers in my school district are required to highlight this anniversary in our Monday classes, which we were told on Thursday. A reasonable expectation, but one that turns out to be not nearly as easy as it sounds (and one of which we would have appreciated a bit more advance notice).

Like most people, I find it difficult to think or talk about 9/11 without thinking and talking about all the shit that's come after 9/11 -- specifically the way BushCo has used 9/11 to its own political ends, doggedly promoting the damaging mentality that "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists," dismantling our constitutional rights, and leading us into a quaqmire of a war that has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and that is certainly not making us safer from terrorism.

I've spent lots of classroom time over the last five years addressing issues related to 9/11. It's never easy -- and always controversial -- to discuss 9/11 with high school students whose opinions often mirror those of their parents and who tend to think that asking them examine their existing beliefs (whatever they may be) is an attempt to impose your beliefs on them. Despite this difficulty, I think I have a pretty good handle on how to deal with 9/11 in the classroom.

That being said, I'm at a complete loss as to how to deal with 9/11 in the classroom ON 9/11. In the first few years after the attacks, I used to have a class discussion about heroes, which worked well. But we're way too far gone for that innocent discussion and our collective perception of 9/11 is far too clouded by BushCo's successful attempt to neatly divide us into freedom-lovers and terrorist-lovers.

My initial plan for this year had been to show clips from a PBS documentary called The Road to 9/11, which traces the roots of terrorism and religious fanaticism in the Middle East. And I definitely WILL do that at some point during the year (like maybe during my unit on religious fundamentalism, wherein I also discuss Pat Robertson and Warren Jeffs), but not tomorrow. Because I'm not sure that exploring the mentalities of those who murdered 3000 people five years ago is a particulary good way of honoring the memories of those 3000 people.

Should we really be doing anything tomorrow except remembering -- in some non-political way -- those who died in the 9/11 attacks? And why, after only five years, is it so hard for us (myself included) to put politics aside for one day and find a meaningful way of remembering?