'It's a generational event:' High school teachers discuss how 9/11 is taught to a generation born after 2001

At 8:46 a.m. Sept. 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Hundreds of miles away, Elyria High School history teacher Matt Jablonski was in a study hall. When another teacher stepped in to tell him what happened and as they began to turn on the TVs, he said she told him he asked her if it was terrorism. "We put the news on right away and we started trying to piece it together and have it make sense for students while we the adults were trying to make sense of it ourselves," he said. "It's a generational event." Lorain High teacher Steve Cawthon was in Room 216 at Southview High School getting ready to hand out a test in his U.S. history class when the news broke. He thought it was a tourist plane that had gotten too close to the building. Twenty years later, both remember watching the news with students. It unfolded in real time: a second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. Less than half an hour later, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. About half an hour after that, passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 attempted to retake the plane, only to have the hijackers crash it into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. "I remember I ended up telling the kids, 'Just give me your tests, we're going to watch this,'" Cawthon said. "When the first tower fell, I remember a student saying 'What just happened?' My response was two-fold: 'We just watched hundreds, if not thousands, of people die. And No. 2, the world has changed forever, from what we knew this morning.'" In all, almost 3,000 people were killed that day — the single largest loss of life from a foreign attack in the U.S. The world froze, Cawthon said — a somber mood he can't remember experiencing at any other point in his life. Now the day Jablonski and Cawthon remember so vividly feels no closer to their students than the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. "Obviously within the first five to 10 years (after 9/11) you're dealing with things like current events," Jablonski said. "It's a student who has a relative who was in the National Guard and is now serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. … And today I think it's a lot more abstract. We're reaching that point where kids weren't even born when that happened. They're looking back and saying 'Maybe my uncle served at that time' just like they're saying 'My grandfather was in Vietnam.'" He said classes look at what changed after the attacks when war became against a less-tangible enemy and there were questions of domestic trust and safety. Cawthon walks his students through his experiences on 9/11 and in the days after, and asks them to interview family members about their own memories. "Before 9/11 I was telling the kids you were worried about the plane crashing because of some kind of mechanical failure," Cawthon said. "After 9/11, you were concerned about are they going to use this plane as a terrorist weapon?" Every generation has an event in their formative years. For some, it was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Two years ago, he'd suspected Generation Z's event would be the Great Recession, which shaped the economy they've grown up in. "Now obviously nobody will be talking about the recession, they'll be talking about the pandemic — how it made them feel, whether they're safe, where they fit in socially, economically. … I think academically the pandemic will be approached in similar ways to Sept. 11, Vietnam or Pearl Harbor and World War II. The event is the cause, what changed after," Jablonski said. For Sept. 11, Jablonski's classes examine economic, militaristic and political shifts, questions of who the terrorists are and who can be trusted domestically leading to things like the Patriot Act. He suspects similar questions will be asked surrounding COVID-19, such as how did it change people's attitudes to science and medicine, politics and economics. While still 20 years ago, the attacks on 9/11 are more poignant, Cawthon said, noting it is important for his students to understand the lives lost that day and the connection to its current events like the U.S. pulling out of Afghanistan. He doesn't think the pandemic will have the same resonating effect as it's been an elongated event since March 2020, but hopes his current students will never experience anything close to it. It simultaneously feels like a lifetime ago and yesterday, he said. Last Friday, Cawthon's students watched a documentary on the attacks. They held a piece of steel from the wreckage. And like every year he's taught the lesson, he paused because he got emotional thinking of the fathers, sons and husbands just like him who never made it home. "Every 9/11 I can still feel that feeling in the pit of my stomach of how sad the whole country felt and everything was off-kilter and 'This isn't something that happens in the United States.' "… I think it put everybody on notice that this can happen here, this did happen here and thank God we have people working to make sure it doesn't happen again. And God forbid it does. When we have these discussions about 9/11, I just don't want to see anything like this happen again." Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.