Remembrance

I was walking out of MAP cafeteria, breakfast with friends just finished and now on our way to Tuesday's morning chapel service.  We noticed a small crowd around the boxy TV in the lobby and paused.  A plane had hit the World Trade Center towers in New York.  We continued on to the chapel and the brief service but that stab at normalcy was quickly defeated.  By the time I made it to my first class of the day--computers--we knew something was terribly wrong.  I don't remember anything my professor taught that day; I was too busy scouring the Internet, desperate to find a news site that hadn't crashed and could give details of the horror unfolding along the East Coast.  I will never forget the tears of a classmate.  Her father worked at the Pentagon.  He was safe but it would be hours before she would know that she still had two living parents.

This day marked the turning point in my life, a definite step into adulthood.  The events of 9/11 have impacted the entire world as I have known it as an adult.  So it is strange to me to look at my students and realize that the seniors only have vague memories of that day and my freshmen?  They only know this day through our stories and photos.  How do I address it then?  Especially in a foreign language class?

This summer I travelde to Spain for the first time.  In addition to many of the top tourist sites, I visited the Atocha Train Station bombings memorial.  It was a sombering moment.  The terrorist attacks during that morning rush hour ten years ago had painful similarities to our 9/11.   The memory of my visit there came back strongly during first period today while I supervised my study hall; two periods later during my planning time, I scrapped my original lesson for Spanish IV and instead designed a simple on-line scavenger hunt to open my students' eyes to the events at Atocha.

The activity can take some refining and honestly is better suited to a lower level since it is all in English.  However, I am proud of the fact that my students had the chance to learn about these events on the anniversary of such significant moments in our own national history.

Atocha: http://www.quia.com/sh/187473.html