9/11 attacks provide springboard for history courses

ARLINGTON -- The morning a pair of hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center, Jerricca Jarrett was sitting in her seventh-grade math class.

Her teacher turned on the classroom television. The burning towers and other images Jarrett saw at age 13 haunted her the rest of the school year. She started a diary of her feelings and reactions.

Then time passed. She tore the pages into small pieces. She wanted to move on.

''I just let it go," said Jarrett, now 17 and a junior at Arlington High School. ''And I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off."

Until last week. She discovered, to her surprise, that her US history textbook devotes seven pages to Sept. 11, 2001, and her teacher was using 9/11 as a springboard to unravel both America's past and present.

Four years after the 9/11 attacks have faded from the everyday consciousness of many teenagers, Jarrett and students around the nation are learning to look at the attacks critically. Middle- and high-school teachers, particularly, are infusing it into history throughout the school year and not only around the anniversary.

In the initial years, teachers primarily focused on students' feelings about the attacks, asking them to write poems and essays. Now, they ask students to draft position papers from multiple perspectives about the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people. Some teachers run debates, charging students to justify the attacks as members of Al Qaeda would.

In Massachusetts, history teachers have been encouraged to teach about 9/11 since the state in 2003 added the tragedy to its list of areas high school students should study. Teachers say they want students to understand how prior foreign policy decisions set the stage for what happened on Sept. 11 and afterward.

At Arlington High last week, principal Charles Skidmore began his US history course with 9/11 and the war on terrorism, planning to work backward in time to the Civil War so that the attacks did not end up a quick mention at the end of the year, if at all.

''I'm using 9/11, which I know kids have a visceral connection to, to say, 'Here are all the things that happened before. Here's a whole 20th century we'll uncover to get a better understanding of why you saw history in the flesh on that day," Skidmore said.

Students split into groups to discuss why terrorists would attack Americans.

''I think it's 'cause we tried to put our culture in the Middle East," said Kayla Flynn, 16.

Her classmate Colin Willey, 17, referred to America's foray into the Middle East for oil in the 1920s. ''The rich got really, really rich and the poor just stayed poor and they got mad," he said.

Their responses pleased Skidmore, who said students, at a minimum, understood how America's involvement in other countries influenced who held the power in those nations.

After the discussion, he passed out a poem about the heroics of ordinary people on Sept. 11 while political leaders took refuge. He asked them to examine the anonymous author's point of view.

''Should the government go into hiding during an emergency? Should we have that bunker mentality?" Skidmore asked.

''It's kind of cowardly," said Amber Duet, 16. ''They should be out there helping the normal people."

''You can have your opinion, but there are two ways to look at an issue," Skidmore said. ''Do we need our leaders to survive? To lead us out of a crisis?"

Throughout the school year, Skidmore will circle back to 9/11. He will reference the attacks when they discuss Abraham Lincoln limiting civil liberties during the Civil War, for example.

''One of the reasons I like starting here is because you were there," Skidmore told his class. ''You can evaluate this and see what's in the book and decide what's real and what's not."

Arlington High's textbook, which the high school began using last fall, contains pictures of firefighters digging through the World Trade Center rubble searching for survivors and the symbolic image of them raising the American flag amid the ruins.

''It's like the first time in a long time that it's been brought back up again," Jarrett said. ''It was kind of weird. You expect to read about the Boston Tea Party or something like that. This is amazing we're actually going to be learning about something that we went through."

History textbooks started including passages on Sept. 11 as early as 2002, and have gotten more in-depth over the years, said the American Textbook Council.

Skidmore said he plans to delve deeper than the book because high school textbooks tend to present history, including 9/11, with a ''Pleasantville" approach, he said. ''There's a subtle bias that America is a great place and everything is fine," he said.

To help students learn to think more critically, Skidmore assigned as homework a recent newspaper editorial about the government's role amid crises.

Many teachers in Greater Boston said they supplement their textbooks with their own writings as well as newspaper articles and television clips. A Lexington High teacher gives students statements made by Al Qaeda before and after 9/11. A Boston high school teacher created his own handout explaining who was responsible for the attacks and how 9/11 has changed the country.

''The current crop of teachers is talking to the generation of policy makers who will be managing issues like civil liberties and the global war on terrorism for the foreseeable future," said Douglas Stuart, an international relations and political science professor at Dickinson College who started a website for teachers about 9/11. ''They're living this history, and if we don't give them some points of reference, then we're not doing our job."

Because of the proliferation of information on the Internet and textbook companies scrambling to compete with up-to-date offerings, teachers are quicker to respond than they were in the past to recent events, Skidmore said.

Willey, an Arlington High junior, said Skidmore's lessons on 9/11 have given him a better understanding of why history is important.

''Pearl Harbor, you read about it and you're like, 'That's really, really bad.' But reading about 9/11 in the textbook is different because you've gone through it. It's like how my parents felt when President Kennedy was assassinated," he said. ''You need to learn about what happened before to understand what's happening now."

Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com.