If you’re an American citizen born before 1994, chances are you remember where you were when you first saw the 9/11 attacks.
For many teachers at EHS, that place was probably in a classroom, watching a live broadcast on an 80-pound television.
Here are the stories of five current teachers who were in the building that day, watching American history being changed on national TV.
Kevin Paur
For social studies teacher Kevin Paur, the first thing he thought of when a student told him about a plane crashing into the Twin Towers was when a B-25 bomber hit the Empire State Building in 1945.
“[The 1945 crash] was bad, but it wasn’t a massive thing,” Mr. Paur said. “I didn’t think much of it.”
It wasn’t until he walked down to a crowded teachers’ lounge full of “chaos” and “confusion” during his third hour prep that he understood what had happened.
“I walk in there, and one of the buildings just fell,” he said. “I realized [then] that it was a really big deal. I stayed there all hour, and I watched the second building go down.”
Mr. Paur said that most of the confusion was because little was known about the scale of the attacks.
“There were reports coming out that there was something in Washington, D.C., and that there was another plane,” he said. “We didn’t really know the extent of it.”
He added that it wasn’t until the afternoon that people “realized that it was over.”
A part of the reason that the lounge was so busy was because of an athletic directors’ meeting. Mr. Paur said that it was one of the ADs who first mentioned that the U.S. could go to war over the attacks.
“There was a real concern that [after] what had, for a long time, been a period of peace, [where] there was nothing going on, that there was going to be war,” he said.
Mr. Paur stayed in the lounge for the rest of the hour. Once he got back to his classroom, he didn’t put news reports on the class TV, instead trying to keep the day “normal” while giving time for students to ask questions.
“All this stuff that we know now – that there were 19 terrorists and al-Qaida was behind it – we didn’t know any of that stuff,” he said.
Within weeks, then-superintendent Ed Hightower held an assembly to ensure that there would be no religious violence as a result of the attacks, according to Mr. Paur.
“Once it had come to find out that there were these 19 terrorists, and they were Muslims, there was a real concern about events or bullying or assaults toward Muslim Americans,” Mr. Paur said. “That was a really big concern, making sure that students were respectful toward each other.”
In addition to a rise in concerns of religious violence, Mr. Paur said that there was a rise in patriotism following the attacks. Before 9/11, students didn’t recite the pledge of allegiance before each school day.
“It [started] a little bit later,” he said. “I don’t think it was 9/12, but I think [there] was a number of Illinois politicians who, soon afterwards, were pushing it.”
According to Mr. Paur, one of the most important things he learned that day as a teacher was to learn as much as possible about an event before discussing it.
“I think what’s really important is that when something happens around the world, the students want to talk about it and understand that, I see that, but I think it’s important … that you’re [not] leading that discussion without full knowledge,” he said. “I don’t remember if that’s what was going through my mind at that time, but I’m glad I didn’t rush into [discussing the attacks].”
Keith Baker
AP U.S. History teacher Keith Baker remembers exactly where he was when he first saw the attacks.
“I was standing near the corner of the foreign language-social studies hallway, and I looked into the room at the end of the hall, and the TV was on, and one of the Twin Towers was on fire,” Mr. Baker said.
After walking in and watching the TV, which had been turned on after a student heard from a parent that “something was not right,” according to Mr. Baker, he left.
“As I walked down the hall, more and more people were getting the message that something had happened in New York City,” he said. “Within 30 minutes, we found out that a plane had hit the first tower and many, if not most, of the students in the A-wing had their eyes on the television when the second plane hit the [second] tower. That’s when we all began to realize that this was intentional.”
Mr. Baker said that students and staff had a wide range of emotional reactions.
“The magnitude of the event finally hit us, and some cried, some were in a state of shock because we watched lives lost,” he said. “Over time, we realized that this was far from over, and if debris is hitting the ground, more people are at risk and that someone has done this intentionally.”
That emotion carried throughout the rest of the day, according to Mr. Baker.
“It was a very somber day,” he said. “Everybody left the building quietly. It was really striking to me that students were so quiet when they left the building.”
According to Mr. Baker, there were two opinions regarding how the rest of the school day should be handled.
“Some in the administration came around and said, ‘Back to work. We don’t need this distraction. Get the kids focused on something curricular,’” Mr. Baker said. “The other voices were the teachers’ voices, who were like, ‘This is like the Kennedy assassination. This is like the moon [landing]. This is a moment in time where everyone will remember where they are.’”
Mr. Baker said that he fell into the second camp, deciding that his students should know as much as possible.
“For the rest of the day, my classes stayed on the news,” he said. “I wanted them to be informed about as much as we could have been informed in that moment about what was happening.”
For Mr. Baker, keeping students as informed as possible about major events is a part of his job.
“As a social studies teacher, I felt a responsibility to help the students understand that whatever this is, there are reasons behind it,” he said. “Something like this is not an accident.
“It’s important, as an adult, and as a social studies teacher, to allow the students to ask questions and to guide them to the right questions,” he said.
Mr. Baker added that he spends a day every year in his AP U.S. History classes overviewing the historical motivations behind the 9/11 attacks.
“No one alive today was there at the beginning to give offense, but it is a generational inherited pain,” he said. “Murder is objectively bad … [but] I think it’s also important to understand what leads people to a moment [in] which they could engage in such behavior. Because terrorism is not new to our world. It wasn’t new to our world on 9/11. It hasn’t gone away since 9/11.”
Angela Van Buskirk
Math teacher Angela Van Buskirk was only four years into her education career when she saw a teacher running down the hall at her, screaming that something was happening in New York City.
“She ran into the [math] office,” Mrs. Van Buskirk said. “We turned on the TV … we were basically flipping through as many channels as we could to see what was going on … and all we could see was smoke coming out of one of the twin towers and … as her and I were watching it, we saw the other plane hit.”
For Mrs. Van Buskirk, disbelief was the first thing that she felt.
“You can’t believe what you’re seeing because you’re so withdrawn from it,” she said. “It felt like you were looking from the outside in, that it wasn’t happening.”
She added that, because news anchors were receiving facts live, it was hard to keep track of what was going on.
“It was complete chaos in terms of what seemed to be going on in terms of information,” Mrs. Van Buskirk said. “Our students didn’t know anything.”
Eventually, teachers began to take turns watching news on the math office TV. Mrs. Van Buskirk didn’t put any broadcasts on in her classroom because of a school-wide email that had been sent out.
During her prep hour, Mrs. Van Buskirk had to tell math teacher Dan Suess, who was a veteran and had older children living on the East coast, about the attacks.
“I said, ‘Dan, I think you might want to go into the office and turn on the TV. I think something is going on,’” she said. “I didn’t even know how to explain it. ‘There’s planes crashing into buildings.’ He just looked at me like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Mrs. Van Buskirk described the mood of the school that day as “blurry,” saying that students were very “quiet” upon returning the next day.
“The kids didn’t have a lot to say because nothing like this had ever happened in most of their teachers’ lifetimes … unless you had a teacher that had been alive during Pearl Harbor,” she said.
Though she wasn’t alive for Pearl Harbor, she did remember what it was like to be in high school during a major global event – the Gulf War.
“I was a senior,” she said. “They told us we were at war, and that freaked me out. I came home, and I was crying to my parents.”
Mrs. Van Buskirk said that the patriotism the country felt during the Gulf War was different than the feeling that brought the country together following 9/11. In the 90s, it was about the military; in 2001, it was about the first responders.
After school Sept. 11, she drove home without seeing planes in the sky. She said that she wouldn’t see any again for about a month.
“When you start seeing [planes] again, you were scared,” she said. “There was a bigger impact. People didn’t want to fly; people didn’t want to travel.”
Mrs. Van Buskirk added that Sept. 12 was difficult, too, and that it was important to stay “strong” and “keep the normalcy” throughout the day.
“It was hard to go back into the classroom and teach math because that’s not where all of our minds were,” she said. “When did it go back to normal? I don’t know if it even did.”
Deanne Voegele
English teacher Deanne Voegele was in the middle of class when a teacher from across the hall first told her about the attacks.
“I had a prep hour the next hour,” Mrs. Voegele said. “I went downstairs to the teachers’ lounge because there was a TV in there and it was showing what had happened. So nobody knew what to think. We were all in shock.”
Once the initial shock went away, the lack of facts led way to unbased claims, Mrs. Voegele said.
“Rumors just started flying around that they were coming for the rest of us, whoever they is,” she said. “And they had taken all the planes out of the sky because they didn’t trust any of them, and that it was going to cost like $10 a gallon for gas. All sorts of crazy things were going around that day and in the days that followed.”
According to Mrs. Voegele, it wasn’t until those days that followed that solid information began to come out, and because of a lack of information, students didn’t react the way they would have if they had seen the attacks that day.
“It wasn’t so much that the kids were upset the very day that it happened because I don’t know that many of them knew what happened,” she said. “And so in the days that followed, as information came out, then we started to talk about it and kind of unpack everything that happened, but it took a long time for us to see all of those images that you guys are probably very familiar with today.”
For Mrs. Voegele, it was hard to decide to unpack all that happened.
“It’s always really hard to know whether you should stop and talk about it, or whether you should just keep teaching so that the kids have a sense of normalcy and that they don’t get upset,” she said. “I think for me, I tend to continue to teach just because I’m a rather emotional person and I cry very easily and I didn’t think that that would be useful for the kids to see their teacher.”
As news began to come out and students could better understand the attacks, the school became very quiet, she said.
“[There were] a lot of solemn, somber faces in the hallway as people started to realize what it all meant,” she said. “We started to see the images [and] started to get the death totals. It was just really quiet … time.”
The most significant thing Mrs. Voegele said she learned from that time was the importance of keeping a situation under control.
“And I realize the most important thing is to remain calm,” she said. “You have to set an example for the kids, no matter how upsetting whatever … happened [is]. You may have to give them directions. You may have to lead them somewhere else. And so you have to just put your emotions aside until you can be by yourself, where you can process that.”
Jane Hicks
The first thing social studies teacher Jane Hicks remembers about that day was getting a call on the classroom phone.
“[The] phone rang, and it was one of my family members,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going on, is everything okay?’ They just called to tell me that my sister, who was nine months pregnant, had gone into labor that morning.”
A second call came about 35 minutes later, according to Ms. Hicks.
“[It’s the] same family member, and I’m like, ‘Did she just have the baby?’” she said. “I mean, usually labor takes like 30 hours. I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ because it was just so weird for somebody that I know to be calling on this phone, and they’re like, ‘No, do you have the TV on?’”
Ms. Hicks turned the classroom TV to the ABC broadcast, which was then showing a cloud of dark smoke coming from the North tower.
“We’re just kind of looking at it and watching it and [the anchors] were saying something about [how] an airplane had hit the building,” she said. “So in my mind, I was like, must have been like crop duster or something. And I’m like, ‘That doesn’t make sense. Crop dusters don’t fly over New York.’ And then all of a sudden, this plane went into the other one.”
By third hour, reports started to come out about the Pentagon being hit in Washington, D.C.
“It just blew our minds,” she said.
News of the fourth plane being crashed didn’t come out until fourth hour, Ms. Hicks said.
“Once fourth hour came along, it kinda seemed like it was over,” she said. “So we turn the TV off, and I remember checking every once in and a while throughout the day.”
It wasn’t until she got home that day that she first heard about al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. For Ms. Hicks, who had never seen such an attack on U.S. soil, the entire event was a “surprise.”
“I was born in the 60s, and I always just thought no one would ever attack us,” she said. “There are two oceans between the US and the rest of the world. And yeah, Pearl Harbor happened, but that was before I was born. So I just was like, ‘We’re blessed in that we will never be attacked. We have the biggest military in the world. That just will never happen.’ So I think when 9/11 happened … I was pretty taken aback.”
Ms. Hicks added that that feeling of being taken aback extended to students, too.
“I feel like the kids were pretty wide-eyed but didn’t start acting crazy,” she said. “They were basically just sort of shell shock … now we know it was a one-day event, and now we know it was four planes, but that evening, the next day, everybody was kinda like, ‘What’s going to happen next.’”
The World Trade Center being such a landmark added to the anxiety about more attacks, according to Ms. Hicks.
“The fact that the Twin Towers were so iconic [with] that image … with the blue sky, it just kind of made everybody think, well, maybe they’re going to hit the Golden Gate Bridge next,” she said.
She added that, as a civics teacher, she felt as though she needed to be as prepared as possible for student questions the next day.
“I did like a Q&A type of thing because that night I was trying to watch as much news as possible and find out what was going on … I wanted to be able to make sure that I was as informed as I could be so the next day I could try to explain what we knew about it.”