9/11 Lesson

This is part of N591UA, which operated United Flight 93 on September 11th, 2001, and was hijacked for possible use against the White House. Instead, a passenger revolt forced down the plane into a field in Pennsylvania. A part of my 9/11 story is that I once flew on that exact same plane, from Portland to Chicago in 1996. Check out my FlightMemory map of lifetime flights.

Dear class,

Today, both Ms. Labossiere and I talked about September 11th, 2001. If you were next door with Ms. Labossiere, here is the lesson that I did on 9/11 with the students with me. Next class (our first early release Wednesday schedule!), we will open the walls and be all together.

AGENDA 9/11/17:
Introductions/Attendance
The Blog
Letter to Class/Mr. Fritz
September 11th, 2001
Fear

Homework: Read the blog recap! Post a comment if you have not. Get your syllabus signed!

September 11th, 2001: To start this section, I asked students to do a free write for about 5 minutes on the following questions:

What do you know about September 11th, 2001? What have you heard about it? Do you remember anything? What have you learned before, in class, or from parents? How did the U.S. Government change after 9/11?

After the free write time, we shared responses as a class and I told my story about September 11th. I was starting my Sophomore year at Wilson High School in Portland. It was definitely a day I will remember for the rest of my life. To drive home the point as to what the day was like, I showed this video in class, which was a timeline of the day:

From there, I moved on to discussing how September 11th, 2001 came about.

Fear: We talked about in class about FEAR. To start to look at how fear played a role after September 11th, I showed a couple of videos:

This is United States Secretary of State Colin Powell addressing the United Nations about the "weapons of mass destruction" that the U.S. government thought was in Iraq. It turned out that there were not any such weapons.

This video contains a montage of President George W. Bush and many of the key figures in his government repeating words in speeches that sounded pretty scary.

The last bit to class would have been another free write, if we had time. This time, it was about fear in our lives. 

The prompt was: write about a time in which you experienced fear and how you felt. What did you want to do in that moment?

Note: this is not homework and we did not get to talk about this in class.

I wanted to make the connection between the fear much of America felt after 9/11. In fact, one of the ways that the government might have helped keep people fearful (or ready) is by making a threat level color coded system.:

In the entire history of the threat level system (which ended under President Obama), the threat level never went below Elevated - meaning we were supposed to be at "significant risk of terrorist attacks," constantly.

We will continue to investigate the role that fear of others plays in our lives throughout the semester.