Lessons Learned
by Michael Risen

The events of Sept. 11 punctuated my first month of teaching high school. My school is private, fills about three city blocks and has 1,125 students, with 175-plus faculty and administrators. Usually, my students' views are filtered through what they see or hear at home, but the timing of attacks didn't give them the opportunity to have those discussions. As a result, every strategy I had developed for working with students — how to keep them quiet, how to define limits in my relationship with people not much younger than myself — was out the window before the school day had even started.

I learned of the tragedy as I prepared for my first day of class. Here in New Orleans, the planes hit right before the bell rang — minutes before classes started and minutes after students left their parents. The news flew through the halls. The administration decided classes would go on, and the faculty was left to contain the spread of rumors. Later in the afternoon, when the media started calling the act the work of Islamic terrorists, an e-mail was sent out telling us to punish racist comments.

But more than enforcers, we had also had to be role models. Teachers do that every day, but not in the same way — usually, when Bill cuts in front of Sue in the lunch line, I pull him aside and tell him about the importance of fairness and consideration. I don't swear. I say sir and ma'am. That kind of role modeling I can handle.

But I wasn't prepared to deal with the events myself, much less to have kids rely on me. I've only known them for a month — 50 minutes a day, five days a week. I had just learned how to make a good lesson plan. How was I supposed to tell them what to do or think? I couldn't — so I held class, trying to keep discussion of the event to a minimum. I tried to teach, but all I could think of was collapsing buildings.

It didn't seem fair. I didn't ask to be thrust into the situation. But no one did, least of all those who died. And my life and lifestyle were not in imminent danger. I did, however, have to watch 1,125 children lose their innocence. I didn't have the words to make everything OK. Just like so many other people in America, I have never felt so powerless in my life.

On midday Tuesday, one of my younger students told me the death toll must be in the millions. He said it not with fear, but with an excited smile. I was disturbed because I assumed that the idea of mass death made him happy-that he didn't understand the gravity of the event. Of course that wasn't the case, but in my adult world, what else could a smile mean?

I assured him that the death toll wouldn't be so high, and he looked at me blankly. But then he bet me "like, a trillion dollars" that it would be over a million. He wasn't happy about the death toll, he just didn't understand it. I couldn't respond, because I couldn't fathom so many people dying at once. He couldn't fathom so many people dying at once either, so he responded by fantasizing the experience.

Now, one week later, everything is not back to normal, but we are developing a new normal. It's a bit quieter in the halls, a bit more polite. I make sure to say hello to everyone, and others do the same. It is a changed environment, and everyone in it — teachers and students alike — will have to take time to understand his or her new place within it. If anything, the experience has brought me into a strange solidarity with my students, because they, like me, are starting to realize that we are together on the young side of the fence, and that our lives will be in crucial ways different from those of our parents. This, then, is my new task as a teacher, to lead them in the seeking out of a new worldview, not as an authority but as a cohort.

Graduation speakers always say that their class has the duty to create a more positive world. Only last May, my graduation speaker told me that the most important fight for my generation was the delineation between useful and false information. I thought he was being trite and obvious. Now I'm not so sure.

E-mail Michael Risen at msrise at wm dot edu.