LOUISVILLE, Ky. — People above a certain age will remember where they were upon hearing about the attack on America 20 years ago.
But kids, and even some young adults, weren’t born yet and only know about the day through stories and history lessons.
Seventh grade Kammerer Middle School teacher Kelley Fox was in sixth grade on September 11, 2001. Now she teaches a class of students roughly that age. Her seventh graders were born in 2008 and 2009.
They’ve experienced the day only through the stories of adults.
“My mom was actually in school at the time,” seventh-grader Clayton Holbrook said. “She was pretty scared, and when she got home, she saw my grandma just crying because it was such a traumatic event.”
The seventh graders in Fox’s class are old enough now to know that September 11, 2001 changed a lot of things.
“Increased security, and also hate between non-Muslims and Muslims as I am Muslim myself,” Eman Atieh said. “People often stereotype us a lot.”
Friday Fox taught a history lesson to her class about 9/11 and the impact it had, both at the time it happened in 2001, and now, 20 years later, as we saw the final troops pulled from Afghanistan.
“I like to piece modern day, what’s going on versus the past,” Fox said. “Even though it was 20 years ago, it still impacts us today.”
Fox’s seventh-graders knew what happened on 9/11 as early as six years old, but they are now at an age when they can understand what happened, and the impact.
“They take it a lot more seriously now because I think they are reaching that maturity age and they’re on social media, so they see a lot of these things,” Fox said.
The history most of us lived through is just that to these seventh graders - history. But it’s history they can see and feel, 20 years later.
“It's just not that fun to learn about, but you kind of need to know about it,” Holbrook said.
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