Teaching 9/11 Fifteen Years Later

How to teach the events of 9/11 is something every teacher grapples with.  Does one stop one’s curriculum? Does one go on with business-as-usual?  I recall the timing of the school year raising an additional challenge over time: It was early in the school year and I didn’t yet know my students very well.  Jacoba Urist at The Atlantic offers a thoughtful essay on the place of 9/11 in education, including this insightful excerpt:

For high-school textbook writers, teaching 9/11 against the backdrop of wars still on-going—and surges of xenophobia—sets it apart from an attack like Pearl Harbor or a trauma like JFK, where, a decade-and-a-half later, both events had a distinct sense of narrative closure. The causes and effects of September 11 may feel empirically muddled for some teachers. On the one hand, 9/11 is referred to as “the darkest day in America’s history.” On the other, students see a fresh wave of terrorist-linked massacres not only in France and Turkey, but in San Bernardino too.

Read the rest @ The Atlantic

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