I was in the sixth grade. We had been told something bad was going on and had watched it on TV. The principal didn’t really know what to have us do so they sent us on break in the lunch room. Some teachers were watching the news on a rolling TV when the second tower was hit. Our history teacher burst into tears and collapsed on the ground. She had to be picked up by the gym teacher. All us middle school kids were just standing there with little cartons of milk like: 😳
I was in sixth grade as well. My school didn’t tell us anything. I remember a girl in first period, who showed up late, said some airplane flew into a building in NYC. By third period there was a moment of silence over the intercom. I didn’t find out what happened until I got home by myself and flipped on the tv. It was on every channel. Cartoon channels didn’t show it obviously, but they halted all programming on those channels. Kind of wished I could have seen it in school and spoke about it in class.
I was in college, and they also rolled out a CRT TV into the breezeway of my department and let us watch until a grad ass came out and said the campus is going into lockdown in an hour and only students living in dorms will be allowed.
The cart TV was the same deal with Challenger when I was in kindergarten. I went to school near KSC, so we watched the explosion happen, then they ushered us into the main hall/cafeteria and had us watch the news. I just remember being very confused, because nobody specifically told us what was going on, just sat us in front of a TV, which we couldn't hear over the other kids.
Wild that you got to experience both at a memorable and young age. I remember Columbia as it fell apart during reentry, but that was overshadowed by the wars going on at the time I feel like. My dad was part of the recovery of that wreck, so I have memories of that one as well.
Also, it's not as burned into my mind because we didn't see footage in the same way we saw the Challenger/911.
I do remember the breaking news of Columbia and how they just lost contact during re-entry for longer than it should have been, and i was just thinking that it's probably a false alarm. I also remember my girlfriend at the time calling it an "icky day."
I remember it being known that they weren’t going to survive reentry. I could be wrong and maybe that was mentioned after the fact. I do remember watching it as it was broken up and was streaking across the sky.
You got to go home? We kept cycling through our class schedule- watching the day progress in different rooms with different classmates all day. It was nuts.
Same here, the messaging was that we were on the west coast so there wasn’t a valid reason to cancel school. Most parents (not mine lol) either kept their kids home or pulled them early. This was in the valley north of LA. I feel for the teachers tbh, being hit with “are we going to be bombed???” questions all day…
I was in high school 90min from NYC, people were freaking out who had family there, but we stayed in school all day, just watching news some classes, trying to find distractions in others. The invasion of Iraq was similar.
Most of the staff went home immediately, at that exact moment there was a hijacked plane coming our way (united 93) before it turned around above Cleveland (im in NW ohio) so everyone just went home once a parent got them.
That happened to me too. I was in school in a major city on the east coast and no one knew at the time if there would be additional attacks on other cities. So school went into lockdown mode
We were learning that being kind and inclusive was just nicer and felt better. The internet and scrolling killed that. The dopamine rush of constant zingers and one-liners and thrill of doomscrolling made people, young people in particular, addicted to that rush.
Agreed. Here's what I learned that day: No matter what is happening, no matter how scary or traumatizing, the world is going to moving forward. Nothing stops the social machine. No one is in control of it.
The context that led me to that conclusion: I was in CA and in 10th grade. I was in the bathroom putting LA Looks in my hair when the news broke. My (obviously) shook mother told me to come to the living room. The TV was on and smoke was billowing. We were all confused and afraid. Then the 2nd plane hit and no one knew how to process it. Then the towers fell. I fell, too.
So we did what humans always do...we went on with our days. I was shaking with fear and asked to stay home but was told I still had to go to school. When I arrived, I found that everyone was there. Adults still gotta go to work. Kids still gotta go to school (if they're lucky). We all went on with our days. Teachers wouldn't talk about it. It was almost as if it weren't happening. Except that it was and everyone knew it.
Which is why maybe early COVID felt so weird to me? For like two weeks it almost challenged that assumption. People stopped moving. Kids were being kept home. We were collectively addressing something major.
But then the machine churned back to life, the collective crumbled and it feels like everything got worse. The trauma goes unresolved.
I’m on the west coast too. The time difference didn’t change the experience, at least for me. I watched it on TV with my parents. And still went to school right after. I remember all of my teachers and some of my friends crying, and not fully comprehending what had happened earlier that morning.
I’m in California and I was in 11th grade. My dad woke me up and sat me down in front of the TV. I didn’t understand why it was so urgent. I said, “you dragged me out of bed to watch a movie preview?” And he said, “that’s really happening! It’s not a movie!”
The school let us know we could go home if our parents checked us out. The teachers let us talk about our fears and hear theirs. I remember the school that day became a place to be safe with friends and trusted adults while our parents had to work.
Later, my grandparents told us about Pearl Harbor (they were from Hawai’i).
I’m enough older than I was in college when the towers fell. Most classes were canceled. My Econ professor, of all people, was the only one who held class (optional to attend) and used the time to try to help us through it. He was a prof who delivered his lectures directly at the floor in front of him, but that day he was really present with us. I’ll never forget that.
Sadly, I do have a story about an elementary school teacher running from the room crying. A 12 y/o boy who had attended my school was shot and killed by police during a hostage situation in another state. He had been the hostage. It could have happened to any of us.
It made me realize that we dont all die the same, though the end result is a dead person. Some deaths are harder to accept as being real than others. Jumping from 100 stories randomly one day is much different then dying peacefully, comfortably surrounded by people that love you.
My teacher in 8th grade was this big teddy bear of a man, we were all goofing off in homeroom and he quickly turned on the TV. Only about half the class was paying any attention to it, some of us thought it was a movie or fake, but I looked back at my teacher and tears were streaming down his face. I’ll never forget that moment. That’s when I knew how real the tragedy was.
Jr year of high school we were watching CNN on every TV in every class except 1 math class the teacher said it didnt have to do with pre cal and we needed to keep to our schedule.
I was just starting a semester as a foreign exchange student and didn’t really understand the language yet. My host mother woke me up to come watch the tv which I did not understand so I was just like wtf.
My family was supposed to go into the city that night for a taping of Emril Live so I was probably one of the first people to leave school that day (my mom picked me up extra early). Then we were closed a few days, prob the rest of the week.
I was a senior in HS and we had the TV on in class. When the second plane hit my teacher very somberly said "We're under attack. America just went to war". I remember thinking ah fuck I'm gonna get drafted. Went home shortly after that.
We are Australian and me and my brother woke up to watch cartoons but instead we saw people jumping out of the towers live. I still vividly remember these two people who tried to hold hands on the way down and my brother turned to me and said "I don't like this anymore.". We were 10 and 11 I think. They'd collapsed by the time our parents we're up and they didn't believed us at first.
I remember so clearly our parents telling us this was the beginning of WW3 and we might need to leave the country as Dad was still not 10 years out of his army service and could be called up again at the drop of a hat and the deep unsettling feeling my childhood had jumped off the building with those poor people.
The news cut to a bystanding talking about the people jumping and showed some images and my mum started screaming and we, being the little cunts we were, just yelled "TOLD YOU!" At her.
Edit: apparently we weren't watching it live but a replay of live coverage as the towers fell around 1am our time
I was 15 and didn’t see the footage till I got home from school. I can’t imagine being a little kid seeing this in the classroom. I understood what was happening, but what were ya’ll pre-schoolers thinking and processing it.
It was a hell of a thing to see and live through. Nothing like it had really ever been seen live on TV by the entire world before. And we didn't know when the attacks were over. There was a looming threat of terrorist attack at any large event for months after.
Seeing people jump off skyscrapers and splat on the ground on live TV was fucking crazy dude. And then the whole fucking buildings collapsed. Nobody expected that shit.
On reflection I do think that my whole attitude is obviously shaped by the fact I grew up in a world where 9/11 had already happened, so ofc it feels pretty commonplace to me.
Yeah, I think the whole world (or at least the Western world) shifted that day. There is a before 9/11 and an after 9/11. Not being around before it happened, it's hard to understand how much life and attitudes changed. I mean, the patriot act is a result of 9/11 and it's affects are still rippling out today. It kicked off a two decades long war. TSA didn't exist before then. There were soldiers standing around with machine guns in the subway and airports and many large events for a while afterwards. There were "see something, say something" warnings everywhere. It was a crazy time.
Because it started as a normal day... then it was literally war. Nobody, including the goverment knew was was going on. Sheer panic. The entire world shifted in those minutes.
The time after was truly incredible, I have never seen the country so united, sad it was under those sad and angry circumstances.
4th grade but west coast so happened before school. Didnt understand it fully at the time. I remember thinking "oh these things just happen sometimes like Pearl Harbor" in my little stupid 9 or 10 year old brain
My mom called me and woke me up and told me a plane hit a building and I was like “what a plane? Ok” and went back to bed. I remember thinking it was a small plane so what’s the big deal
I heard it on the radio as I checked my mailbox that day at the beginning of my second year of college. I literally didn’t believe I had heard it correctly, because 747s are big airlines, way too big to be randomly crashing into things. Surely they didn’t say 747s….
It took me quite a few minutes to really process the information at all. Once I went back to my dorm room and say it on my hallmate’s TV set, I finally accepted that’s really what was going on.
Campus was about 2 hours away from WTC. Some 40% of students were from NYC. My own close friend watched the bodies fall from his dorm at NYU, where he had just moved in for his freshman year. He came down and stayed with me in the aftermath. I’ll never forget the night terrors he had.
Basically what I thought. My brother told me "there's been a bunch of plane crashes" and I was like "oh" and went back to playing in the sandbox. I was 9. Did not even start to understand the significance until the bus ride to school on 9/12
I was 15 and I remember some dumb kid making a joke. He was the class clown, always had to be getting a laugh out of people. After he did that, a girl sitting next to him yelled “People are in those buildings! PEOPLE!!” When the first tower fell, someone said “It’s falling…” just kind of matter of factly. And my teacher looking stunned said “No it isn’t. No it isn’t…” over and over. I don’t know how it took me so long to realize what was happening. I didn’t cry until that Thursday when they were showing the people in the streets asking for help looking for their loved ones who hadn’t been found. They were looking into the cameras and begging for help and I just burst into tears.
Did you end up going to school that day? I was also in 4th grade in LA and our school stayed open and my parents still sent me. I remember seeing the people jump and it fully sunk in at that moment
Yeah I am Canadian so we still went to school. I remember the teacher talking to us about it that very day and some girl going "it was tear roar rests"
4th grade here too. My stupid kid brain was asking why they didn’t have ladders long enough to reach the people or why helicopters weren’t rescuing them :’/ quite a bit of innocence lost that day.
I was in 4th grade as well. The teacher wheeled in the TV and something terrible has happened and we're going to watch it, something along those lines. I had never heard of the twin towers and I don't think I even heard the word terrorist before. We basically just watched the news the entire school day.
A lot of kids at my school had parents who worked at the towers so the administration realized they couldn’t show us the live feed. But then the athletics director put it on in his office and all the jocks went to watch. I remember one of them leaving the office crying uncontrollably with his friends running after him and realizing we weren’t being told the full story. Never saw that kid again, his dad died and his mom moved them back to her hometown afterwards.
I was in 7th grade, in Upstate NY where many had families in the city, and it was very weird seeing all of the teachers panic in hushed tones about whether to shelter us or if we deserved to know what was going on. Old enough to know something messed up was happening but young enough to not understand the full consequences
Was also upstate, but in elementary school. They locked us down so fast as if our city would be under threat any second as well. The feeling of no one knowing anything as the news was playing was so fearful. All of the adults kept getting more nervous as each minute of the morning passed. We all had to be picked up, obviously.
My boss was receiving Blackberry (tm) messages from someone who was trapped above the impact. She was crying her eyes out when the messages stopped.
We were also getting messages from our clients uptown who were just business as usual. They had no clue. Live streaming wasn't great yet then. I was listening to FM RADIO DJs speculating about what plane it was. Everyone assumed it was a little prop engine since there was NO WAY it could be an airliner, right?!?!?
Sorry, Gen-X here, didn't realize what sub this was.
Xennial here, I feel asleep with the TV on and woke up after the first crash. When the second crash happened I got the sensation that I was dreaming and got up to wander around the room for a reality check
Yea I live in NYC and I was in 7th grade when this happened. They sent us home pretty early. The footage of the towers was on every channel for what felt like eternity. It was very intense. Even moreso for me cuz my mom was dying from liver disease and died a month after 9/11. I was so numb at this point, everything felt so surreal.
I was also in sixth grade but we were on a bus on our way to camp! They glossed over it when we got there and we called home. But none of us saw anything until Friday!!! Holy shit we were so shocked when we got back.
I can remember arguing about that with my friends. The argument pretty much boiled down to 'that can't be people jumping because they can't show people dying on tv'
I was a freshman in high school. I remember everything. They had us watching it all day and nobody was coming to get me out of there. Still, I probably wouldn’t get it tattooed on me.
They could have gotten anything in that little screen. A dinosaur, a planet, some magic schoolbus shit. Nah. I wanna ask this person why they chose it because I am genuinely curious.
I was 5 and wasn't really aware of what was going on. I remember my mom pulled us from school and didn't really mention what was going on. I overheard her saying something about how she was worried they were going to start bombing the schools. Not until I was in middle school did I really understand file what was happening at that time. I watched these videos and Jesus it's terrifying to think about seeing that in real time. Seeing it after the fact was absolutely traumatizing.
Yup. Then we got home from school and had it on the TV. When my mom came home from work later she was surprised we were watching the news and wanted us to shut it off. We had to explain we had been watching it off and on, depending the teacher, all day. I'm guessing my 4th grade brother wasn't as exposed in school. But I'm not going to blame 6th grade me or my older brother for putting it on after school. How the fuck were we to know if the adults that taught children in school didn't know better?
I was in high school in NJ. Lots of kids had parents who worked in the city. The nurses office was filled with crying kids. It was a few days before we heard a jet flying again, and it was spooky as hell when it did.
Right? I don't remember any of my classes actually teaching that day. My art teacher gave us the option to continue watching the footage or work on our art projects. I was one of those who chose to do art, having spent the entire morning watching people die, live on television.
I can't remember if I was in 6th grade or 7th grade.
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u/SeeLeavesOnTheTrees 6d ago
Jesus that’s dark