On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, many teachers are ensuring the generation born after the attacks understands the significance of that day for our country, and often in the lives of their educators as well.
Darien teacher Jennifer Ladd is one educator who has personal memories of that day that she shares with her students every year as she teaches them about 9/11. Ladd joined Jack Oehm, a retired FDNY Battalion Commander who works with the Tower to Tunnels Foundation, yesterday on WNPR’s Where We Live to discuss their personal stories from the day and how they teach the history of 9/11 to today’s students.
Before she became a teacher, Ladd worked for a financial software company in midtown Manhattan and had many clients in lower Manhattan. From the south facing windows of their office on the 29th floor, they saw as the first tower was hit.
“The hardest thing for my students to wrap their heads around is that the communication we had that day wasn’t instantaneous. Back then we didn’t have cell phones,” she says. “Initially I could be on my computer, but then that stopped working. We made phone calls in the morning, but then the phone lines stopped working as well. We had the TV on and we saw when the second plane hit, but eventually the TV signal went out as well.”
She and her colleagues found a functioning radio in the office, and that’s when they learned that multiple plains had been hijacked and that the pentagon had been hit.
“We had to decide whether to stay or evacuate. Eventually we decided to evacuate, walk down 29 flights, and try to figure out the best place to go in Manhattan that potentially would not be a target.”
It wasn’t until later in the day when they arrived at an apartment that was not near any landmarks that the group realized the South Tower had fallen. They had seen plumes of smoke as it happened, but because of the views offered from their office, weren’t able to actually see what had happened to create the smoke.
Ladd had already been considering a career change, but the events of that day decided her on a new direction.
“There’s lots of reflection after an event like that. I asked myself, do I want to spend my time doing this job, or do I want to do something that’s more rewarding?”
Now, no matter what classes she is teaching in any given year, she always instructs her students about 9/11.
“I think it’s really import for students to hear what it was like on that day and the context leading up to it in age appropriate ways,” Ladd says. While she teaches high schoolers, she recommends the 12-minute video Boatlift, that can be found on YouTube, narrated by Tom Hanks, to both high school and middle school teachers.
“It’s really fantastic and tells the tale of the watercraft that assisted that day. It was the largest maritime evacuation in history, surpassing World War II.”
Another video she shows that also centers around the efforts of ordinary people who stepped up and decided to help is the documentary Man in Red Bandana that shares the story of Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter who saved many people before he was killed when the South Tower collapsed.
Ladd says that one of her most important takeaways for her students comes from the documentary 9/11 that French filmmakers Jules and Gédéon Naudet made by embedding themselves with the firefighters of Engine 7, Ladder 1 in Lower Manhattan.
“One of the firefighters in that video says, ‘You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror everyday when you go to work and decide that you really want to do this job.’ I hope my students think carefully about what they want to spend their lives doing.”
Listen to the entire show on teaching 9/11, twenty-five years later.
