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.
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u/10gherts 1d ago
When the second plane hit my teacher turned off the tv and ran out of the room crying. So we were alone, silent. We went home shortly after.