RANDOLPH — Brian Rainville was sitting in the back of a history classroom at Randolph Union High School 20 years ago when the class got word that something was happening in New York City. The other teacher in the classroom plugged in a TV. A few minutes later they watched in real time as a second plane hit the World Trade Center.
“None of my training prepared me for that moment,” said Rainville, who teaches American history and theater at the high school. “In those moments my students needed to know they were safe because we didn’t really know what was happening. My big job that day was to listen and let them process what they had seen and the anxiety, the fear, the uncertainty and the anger because we knew that the nation changed in those horrific few minutes.”
The educators who were in the classroom on Sept. 11, 2001, tried to keep their emotions in check and help students understand events when they had very little information themselves.
Jennifer Haines, now an English teacher at Richmond Middle School in Hanover, was in her third year teaching at a high school in Allentown, Pa., on 9/11. She and another educator watched the second plane hit the tower, and about 10 minutes later she had to go in front of her students.
“I didn’t do anything with content. We were just watching the news,” Haines said. “Now looking back on it it was an irresponsible decision, but at the time, you’re so caught up in what’s happening.”
Soon, the principal came over the loudspeaker to tell all teachers to turn off their TVs and try to stick to the day’s curriculum. Students intermittently left the classroom to try to call relatives in New York City.
“We were all totally scared,” Haines said. “The following day that’s when you saw flags out and everyone unifying. This was an attack on American soil and we’re going to stand together in the country.”
Before Jen Ellis attended the Upper Valley Educators Institute in the early 2000s, she was in her second year at a high school in North Carolina as a member of Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that places young teachers in underserved areas throughout the U.S. On 9/11, Ellis gathered with her students in another teacher’s classroom, where there was a TV set up with a bunny ears antenna. They watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center.
“I was 23 and I was supposed to be the adult in charge, but really I was also like a kid standing in the back of the class crying because I knew this was really serious and it was really scary,” said Ellis, who now teaches second grade at Westford Elementary School in Vermont.
She knew it was her job to help her students process what they were seeing, but it was a struggle.
“At the time I really didn’t have the skills to do that. I was very, very young and I was trying to figure it out as I went,” she said. “Now I do. Now when big things happen, I understand that part of my role as a teacher is to help the kids create a narrative they can live with that’s rooted in truth and fact.”
Elijah Hawkes, who until last year was the principal at Randolph Union High School and is now the director of School Leadership Programs and Program Faculty at UVEI, was teaching at a small public school in New York City on 9/11. His first inkling that something was wrong was when a student arrived late to class, mentioning something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center.
“I thought, ‘Oh, she’s confused about what’s going on. I’m glad she here in class; let’s keep going,’ ” Hawkes recalled. “This was before anyone or most people had smartphones. The news wasn’t pouring into our pockets the same way it does these days.”
Soon, all the students gathered in one large classroom. Instructors worked on connecting them with their families. No student was allowed to leave that day unless they were with a family member.
“We took care of each other pretty carefully so there was some good attention to the social and emotional welfare of faculty and students,” said Hawkes, who was in his late 20s at the time and in his first year of teaching in the U.S. “I just remember walking home 100 blocks and the avenues being empty. My strongest impression is the silence of the city afterward.”
In the years since, teachers have had to figure out when — and how — to introduce 9/11 into their lesson plans. They are now also years into teaching students who have no collective memory of the terrorist attacks.
Rainville has waited for students to bring up 9/11 on their own before introducing it to the class. Once they do, he stops his other lessons to focus on students’ questions. He doesn’t show the video of the second plane hitting the tower.
“I let my students know it’s there and I might put a link in the Google classroom, but I want them to very much have control over what they see,” Rainville said. “I really struggle and still struggle to teach 9/11. … It’s very challenging work, and 9/11 for me is like addressing questions of slavery and injustice. You have to be very sensitive to who is in the room and the range of experiences that they have lived and their family has lived.”
In 2014, he attended a weeklong seminar for educators hosted by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York. There he learned more about how the buildings fell and heard from survivors, first responders and family members of those who died. He was also witness to the tasks of the volunteers, who would place white roses near etched names to mark important events in a victim’s life like anniversaries and birthdays.
“What that seminar did was give me immediacy and an astounding array of information that I then have to discuss those events with my students,” Rainville said. He once took students to see the play Come From Away in New York City, which focuses on a group of people who were stranded in a small town in Newfoundland, Canada, on 9/11 after planes were grounded. “That’s a narrative that focuses on compassion, of hope, of service, and those are important moments to consider as a historian and a teacher of history because you get these amazing moments where humanity rises up to do more than the right thing.”
Haines taught in Pennsylvania until 2005 before moving to New Hampshire. In the years after 9/11, she marked the day with a moment of silence with her students. In 2011, she learned about a short documentary called Boatlift, which focuses on the boat captains who helped rescue close to half a million people who were stranded in lower Manhattan on 9/11.
“We’ll watch the video and talk about resilience,” Haines said. “It’s the idea that we haven’t lost our humanity. It seems like a lot of people were willing to put themselves on the line to help others out.”
Ellis remembered watching the Challenger space shuttle explosion that killed all the astronauts aboard in her classroom as a second grader before her teacher quickly turned the TV off. Teaching on 9/11 helped prepare her for teaching students through other difficult events like the Sandy Hook school shooting, the murder of George Floyd and the current COVID-19 pandemic.
“As the years went by, I moved to teaching elementary school and I was very quickly teaching kids who didn’t know what 9/11 was, who didn’t know what the significance was of the day,” she said. “If we don’t talk about this in school or we don’t address it in age-appropriate ways, then history will repeat itself forever.”
A year after 9/11, Hawkes went back to teaching abroad. He decided to return to the states as the first troops were being deployed to Iraq.
“I thought living abroad I needed to come home and focus on American citizenry,” Hawkes said. “We really need our American youth to grow up and become conscientious global citizens.”
In some ways, teaching 9/11 is no different than teaching other events that occurred before students were born, Rainville said. In that context, students can better understand the Civil War, D-Day and the Vietnam conflict.
“History is a study of loss, and American history is a very difficult journey because there are glorious moments and there are events of great injustice of moral failings, and of mass death,” Rainville said.
When the U.S. ended its involvement in Afghanistan last month — the war 9/11 prompted 20 years ago — he felt some of that trauma from 9/11 reopen.
“I’ve had some very challenging days here, but most everything pales to that morning in the classroom,” Rainville said. “I think Americans are still very much wounded by the events of 9/11 and struggling to understand not just those events, but where it took us and why.”
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
