September 26, 2001
Lessons they'll never forget
NYC teachers respond to tough questions

After almost four decades as a high school teacher, John Roche knew better than to offer empty reassurances to his students.

"At that age they have great 'bull' detectors," said Roche, a history teacher at Staten Island's Tottenville High School. "There's no reassuring them that this wouldn't happen again. You can't say you're perfectly safe."

Besides, as a student of history, he feels a special burden to answer tough questions and question easy answers. "When you get beyond simple gut reactions, the country is facing amazingly complex issues. Where are our kids going to get a thoughtful discussion if we who have studied this stuff don't offer different perspectives? The media?"

While most of the city and country sat transfixed by the grim television images, or huddled together with co-workers or friends, New York City teachers had no such luxury. No sooner had the World Trade Center buildings collapsed than they had to put aside their own fears and grief and help 1 million school children.

What would they tell them? How would they act? High school teacher Roche's brand of candor just wasn't an option for Steve Quester, who teaches first grade at Brooklyn's Children's School. Located only blocks from the Brooklyn waterfront, the kids have a front-row view of the lower Manhattan skyline. But on the morning of the tragedy Quester and colleagues calmly closed the curtains to shield 6-year-olds from the nearby catastrophe. The school, he said, needed to be a "sanctuary."

Even hours later, as word of the massive towers' collapse and loss of life began to seep through, Quester sat down with his kids and asked them what they'd learned. When they said it had all been the result of a tragic accident, he didn't correct them.

Resiliency

Kids, Quester said, have enormous resiliency, thanks to the self-protective way they process information.

He told of how students in his first-grade class drew pictures of people jumping out of a burning World Trade Center with parachutes on. "This was their way of making things less horrible to them."

Still, he was unequivocal about protecting the young from television's graphic images. "Kids don't understand it's a videotape replay. They think it's a new tragedy."

Blocking out the news isn't an option for the 13-year-olds in Patricia Urevith's social studies class at IS 93 in Queens. "They've all been watching the news and listening to adults so they're very upset and angry."

Even so, the kids seem intent on putting that anger to good use. "I'm not getting a lot of 'drop the nuke on them,'" Urevith said. "Instead, they all want to do something for the victims."

New heroes

The focus, though, isn't just on the victims. "If you had asked my students a week ago who their heroes were," said Urevith, "they would have said a basketball player or a rock star. Now their heroes are the firefighters, the police and the everyday people who do heroic acts and never get attention. There's a new definition of heroism."

With a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies, Linda Steinmann knows only too well the political cauldron that produces martyrs ready to blow themselves up for the cause. When the kids in her Advanced Placement American government class at Forest Hills High School ask how it is that anyone could cheer the news of mass slaughter, she tells them of the "rage" so many in the Middle East feel "about the gap between the Third World and the First World."

When the talk turns to exacting revenge against "them," she asks if they know that the "them" is a global terrorist network with killer cells stretching from remote mountain hideouts in Afghanistan to suburban duplexes right here in America. "There's a lot of Arnold Schwarzenegger-like bravado right now about signing up and going to war," says Steinmann. "But I just want them to understand this is not like any threat we've ever faced before."

The story was much the same at the Urban Academy on Manhattan's upper East Side where Avram Barlowe's history class was a tangle of frayed nerves, hot tempers and hard questions.

"The kids are very angry right now," said Barlow, days after the attack. "They're just beginning to sort this all out."

- Jack Schierenbeck