Schools

DOE Puts Out Teacher's Guide for Discussing 9/11 With Students

Acknowledging the difficulties of teaching about the attacks on the World Trade Center, the DOE provides lesson plans

There's never a shortage of academic subjects students would love to skip. But this fall, it’s teachers who are grappling with a tough subject.
 
With the , some educators are uneasy about teaching the fall of the .

The Department of Education has produced a series of lesson plans for use over the course of the year to help teachers, but is leaving it up to the schools to decide which, if any, to use.
 
"The school is going to observe a moment of silence,” said Adam Marcus, a librarian at PS 32 in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

“It depends on the teacher and the grade level, whether they will be doing anything on it,” he added.
 
DOE Chief Dennis Walcott hopes they will.
 
“The brutal nature of the attacks raises difficult emotions and challenging questions,” said Walcott in a letter to school principals. Walcott called on them to see that teachers do use part of the guide.
 
Sparing K-2nd graders the uglier side of geopolitics, the lesson plan for those youngsters supplies an answer to the question, ‘Why did the terrorists do this?'
 
"The men who hijacked the planes wanted to kill many people and hurt the United States," the answer prompt reads, continuing, "Afterwards, they thought that the United States would become weaker and would lose some of its freedoms. They thought they would continue making attacks and eventually become more powerful than the United States."
 
It did not mention where the hijackers came from, or what motivated their desire to kill Americans and weaken the nation.
 
For grades 3-5, the DOE does identify al Qaeda as the attackers, using the mention of the Muslim group as a way to transition into a discussion about tolerance.
 
"The attacks of 9/11 provoke profound emotions, including sadness and anger, and raise questions about how and when lessons of tolerance can be integrated into a classroom discussion of these events,” the lesson background reads. “Perhaps the best place to start is to recall that the 9/11 attacks were driven by al Qaeda’s extreme intolerance, rooted in a rigid ideology of hatred and social control that claims to speak on behalf of all Muslims."
 
For middle-schoolers, the DOE has a range of topics from Islamic extremism to raising the question of the balance between civil liberties and security.
 
But at the high school level, Kavita Gupta, the principal of The Brooklyn Academy of Global Finance in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, said she doesn’t think high schools have lived up to the full challenge of discussing September 11 with teens.
 
"I don’t think that we’re doing enough to talk about it in schools, because it involves discussing religion, and we’re so fixated on the separation of church and state, so we don’t talk about it in a candid, loving and understanding way,” said Gupta adding, “Ten years, later, there should have been more progress.”
 
Gupta, whose school focuses on global finance, says she hopes to build cross-cultural connections. “I want them to have pen pals in Shanghai and partner with the Middle East. I would like for us to read more about the differences in the religions, in the context of global history,” she said.
 
But at the , a Catholic elementary school in Bayside, 9/11 remembrance will be a day of American flags and sentiment.
 
Each teacher will bring their students out to the street with their classroom flag, and pray. At a separate event on September 16, the schools will present a quilt with a memorial square made by each child. “If they wanted to simply write a ‘God Bless You,’  it’s very open ended,” said Principal Dennis Farrell.

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