AUBURN — Kevin Cullen’s Advanced Placement U.S. history students were too young to recall a lot about 9/11, but what they do remember comes back to them in chilling snapshots.
The shock on a first-grade teacher’s face when the school principal whispered in her ear.
Older kids trading rumors on the school bus about a bombing somewhere.
A parent turning off the TV to block news video of planes flying into buildings.
For an hour Friday, the Saint Dominic Academy class talked about four days that made American history: the attack on Pearl Harbor, Black Tuesday, the day President John F. Kennedy was shot and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
At the front of the classroom, Justin Cruz shuffled his feet and looked down at the 10-year-old New York City newspaper in his hand. He remembered more about Sept. 11 than his classmates. As a 6-year-old living in Queens, he’d leaned against a railing, looked out over the Hudson River and watched a tower fall. Even a decade later, it’s hard for him to put the images into words.
“I look out in the distance and all I see is one tower standing,” he said. “And you see smoke.” Then, a little more quietly, “All you see is smoke.”
On the last school day before the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, Cullen broke from lessons about 1700s colonial America to talk with his 16 students about hope, faith, and days that changed the United States, with a focus on Sept. 11.
“It’s always been a theme of American history: hope,” he told the class.
It was a lesson that had personal meaning to Cullen. His family was from New York and he knew the area that was attacked. Cullen was working at a golf course in California on Sept. 11. He shut down the business and picked up his daughters from school.
“I couldn’t hold them tight enough that day,” he said. “(Sept. 11) was one of those things that stops time. I knew it was going to change history.”
The students talked about what the attacks meant for America, including the immediate aftermath of fear and confusion, ensuing discrimination against Muslims, changes in airline security, hope for the future and faith that America would persevere.
But mostly, they spoke about their memories of that day, choppy and colored by young children’s points of view but still vivid, whether they were standing on the banks of the Hudson River in New York City on 9/11 or sitting in their first-grade classes in Maine.
And they thought about what they would tell their own kids of the history they witnessed.
“It wasn’t a good day,” Cruz said.
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- Kevin Cullen, an Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher at Saint Dominic Academy in Auburn, discusses the events of Sept. 11, 2001, with his class Friday.
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- Justin Cruz, 16, a student at Saint Dominic Academy in Auburn, holds a newspaper with the Sept. 11, 2001, news. Cruz was living in Queens, N.Y., at the time and witnessed the collapse of one of the World Trade Center towers when he was 6 years old.
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- Justin Cruz, 16, a student at Saint Dominic Academy in Auburn, holds a newspaper with the Sept. 11, 2001, news while talking to students in the Advance Placement U.S. history class on Friday. Cruz was living in Queens, N.Y. at the time and witnessed the collapse of one of the World Trade Center towers when he was 6 years old.
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