I Was in a Maine 8th Grade Classroom When I Heard The News of The Twin Tower Attacks
Twenty-five years ago today, I was sitting in Mr. Boynton’s eighth-grade history class at China Middle School.
It was September 11, 2001.
At some point that morning, another teacher came into the room and told us something that, at 13 years old, was almost impossible to comprehend.
America was apparently under attack.
Passenger planes were crashing into buildings in New York City.
Remember, this was 2001. There weren’t smartphones in every kid’s pocket. There wasn’t social media. We couldn’t immediately pull up a livestream or scroll through hundreds of videos showing us what was happening.
Our school only had a handful of TVs, and each one was strapped to one of those big black rolling carts that basically every school had back then.
Someone wheeled one into our history classroom.
They turned on CNN.
And we watched.
Other classes eventually joined us. Students packed into the room as images of smoke pouring from the World Trade Center played over and over on the television.
Nobody spoke.
It was solemn. Confusing. Scary.
Looking back now, we know exactly what was happening.
At 8:46 that morning, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower. Another hijacked plane struck the Pentagon, and United Flight 93 eventually crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.
But sitting in that classroom in rural Maine, we didn’t know how big this was yet.
We didn’t know if it was over.
We didn’t know if more planes were coming.
We didn’t know what America was going to look like when we woke up the next morning.
I remember going home after school and finding my parents glued to the television.
Honestly, I don’t think any of us really understood what we were watching.
Would there be more attacks?
More planes?
More cities?
More death?
By the end of that day, 2,977 innocent people had been killed in New York, at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93.
It became one of those rare moments in history where almost everyone who was old enough to remember can tell you exactly where they were when they heard the news.
For me, it will always be Mr. Boynton’s eighth-grade history classroom at China Middle School.
And somehow, that was 25 years ago.
That part is difficult for me to wrap my head around.
I can still remember the television on that cart. I can remember the silence in the room. I can remember the strange feeling of realizing that something enormous was happening, even though I wasn’t old enough to fully understand what it meant.
I can still feel some of the same emotions I felt that day.
But now I’m a parent.
My kids weren’t alive when any of this happened.
To them, September 11 is history.
It’s something they learn about in school, see in documentaries or read about online.
To those of us who lived through that day, though, it doesn’t really feel like history.
Sometimes it still feels like yesterday.