CRMS Humanities Students Touched by Powerful Patriots Day Lesson
The attention was unwavering and the emotion was palpable when Chestnut Ridge Middle School sixth-grade humanities teacher Michelle Maccarella shared a video of the poignant images of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, distributed a poem about the events of that day and had her students express their thoughts about how our American culture changed from that day forward.
The audience of 11-year-olds, most of whom had seen the images from 18 years prior, grasped the significance of Patriots Day and the loss of 2,975 innocent people on American soil, and clearly distinguished cultural changes that redefined our way of life since the deliberate actions of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization in New York, Washington, D.C. and in Pennsylvania.
“I still get emotional watching this video and seeing these images,” Maccarella told her class. “Most everyone, who has a recollection of that day, can tell you where they were, who they were with and what they were doing when those planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Eighteen years later, it is still difficult to see the images of those heroes, the firefighters and police, who rushed into those buildings when everyone else was rushing out. These hijackers lived in our country, learned how to fly these planes and patiently planned out these attacks. September 11th was a wake-up call for all of us.”
The students read the anonymous poem, “On Monday We Emailed Jokes,” that described how the world changed from Monday, September 10, 2001, to Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and shared their thoughts on the variety of changes and protocols that have been since enacted to protect the safety of Americans from the threats of terrorists.
“On Monday, we thought we were secure. On Tuesday, we learned better,” the poem read. “On Monday, we had families. On Tuesday, we had orphans.”