9/11 Teaching Brought to Millennium High

By Matt Dunning
POSTED OCTOBER 6, 2008

Seventeen-year-old Priscilla Do remembers, vividly, the novel “Hatchet” by Gary Paulsen.

That was the book she and her 5th-grade class at P.S. 89 were reading the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. They had just reached a passage that described a plane’s crash landing when another teacher ran into the room, shouting and pointing out the window at the World Trade Center. American Airlines Flight 11 had just crashed into the North Tower.

“We thought we jinxed it,” said Do, who was only 10 at the time. “It took a few therapy sessions for us to realize that it was because of terrorist attacks.”

Do was one of a few Millennium High School students last month who expressed her experiences and feelings about 9/11 at a press event at the school, announcing plans by the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum to develop a comprehensive 9/11 curriculum.

“It’s weird to think that we’re a part of history,” 11th-grader Kiersten Chresfield said of her fellow Millennium students, amid a phalanx of reporters and news cameras.

“We were a school that was birthed from 9/11, and we wouldn’t be here without it,” Chresfield said.

(The school, at 75 Broadway, was partially funded with federal dollars from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.)

To commemorate the seventh anniversary of the attacks, museum officials introduced an eight-minute video chronicling the attacks, and the hours following them.

The video, along with a discussion guide, was distributed to school administrators around the country, as well as secondary and high school teachers in New York City and New Jersey.

It is the first piece of what officials hope  will someday be an in-depth lesson plan that seeks to explain the attacks, their immediate impact on the city and the country, and their lasting effect on the world.

“We know teachers feel ill-prepared to address 9/11 in their classrooms,” the museum’s director of education, Sonnet Takahisa, said during the presentation. “We believe that it is an educational imperative that we relate the story of Sept. 11 honestly so that we can begin to understand its place in American history, in world history and in each of our lives.”

Although museum officials could not say when the nationwide curriculum will be developed, the museum hopes to have lesson plans tailored to tri-state area schools completed in three years.

Later that day, Corey Pickering, a global studies teacher at Millennium, met with her Islamic studies class to discuss the video. Her students, she said, were visibly shaken by the film.

“Most of these kids were living down here at the time,” she said. “It definitely stirred up a lot of memories and emotions.”

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