9/11: Highlight of graduate teaching experience

In the last weeks of school, I assigned my college students to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” I didn’t know what to expect. Would my students enjoy it? Would they think it was too postmodern or contemporary? Would they understand the complexities it holds? Either way, I knew it would be a challenge, but it was a challenge I had been looking forward to all semester.

I was not expecting to be reminded that my students had not experienced September 11, 2001, in the same way that I had. I had forgotten that my oldest student would have only been in first grade at the time, and my youngest students were only 4 or 5 years old.

I was not expecting I would have to remind them of the chaos, uncertainty and utter panic that America felt that day. But when I realized this was the tone I needed to remind my students of, I rose to the challenge by setting aside a class devoted to listening to the audio recordings of the news reports that morning, and we watched the “9/11: Falling Man” documentary.

I think that I achieved my purpose – my students were shocked at the fragmentation and confusion they heard in the news report of the attack on the first tower. Eyes widened as they heard the gasps of horror as the second tower was struck while America watched and listened.

As we switched gears and began watching the documentary, what seemed to stick out to them were the images and video that they had not seen. By their own admission, they felt their experience of Sept. 11 was an experience of patriotism and heroism. The pictures that stood out in their minds were the images of people coming together, uniting under a common cause, and pictures of the firefighters and police heroically rescuing and aiding the survivors. What they had not seen were the falling bodies, the images of torture that came to light in the Abu Gharib prison, and the chaos that ensued on that morning.

I would rank that class as one of the highlights of my graduate teaching experience, because I think it was enlightening not only for my students, but for myself. As we discussed our perspectives, we were able to talk about the ways in which our understandings of history and experience are shaped by external forces: the environment in which we learn about these events, and unfortunately, the media’s representation of those events.

As the semester comes to a close, in a way, I’m glad that I saved this discussion for these final weeks. I don’t think the frank honesty and raw emotion that has been shared by my students would have been as forthcoming earlier in the semester. I’m hopeful that if my students take away anything from my class, it will be our discussion about Foer’s contemporary novel. More and more, I realize the importance of understanding the ways in which our experiences are shaped by what surrounds us.

As one of my students pointed out, history happens in cycles: violence and tragedy are, unfortunately, generational. Now I understand why my parents and grandparents are able to remember exactly what they were doing when President Kennedy was shot. We all have cultural and historical experiences that will forever remained ingrained in our memories. How do we cope with those experiences and how do we choose to remember them? That, I think, is the essential question of Foer’s novel, and it is the question that I hope my students take away with them as they continue to shape their own viewpoints based on their own subjective experiences.

Heather Bozant Witcher can be reached at hbozant witcher@clarionherald.org.