Terrorism now part of curriculum

As they watched the Twin Towers crumble five years ago, teachers found little guidance other than instinct to teach students about the unfolding events.

Now, they have a full curriculum.

Terrorism has been added to the state's high school social studies core curriculum. A Bingham High teacher is fleshing it out in a full-scale unit in a class called American Problems. Another educator finds the 9/11 attacks a jumping off point to discuss anything from the War of 1812 to Pearl Harbor. An elementary school teacher seizes student-inspired teaching moments surrounding that day. And the University of Utah's Middle East Center is receiving requests for information teachers never before considered using in their classrooms.

Some teachers say the event can't help but seep into lessons.

"I used to have to say to my students, and I've been teaching for 30 years now ..., 'You have never had a life-defining experience like we had when President Kennedy was shot,"' said Scott Crump, Bingham High

School's history department chairman and 2004 Utah Teacher of the Year.

But now, "when we talk in history, 9/11 might become such a defining moment, their generation might be called, instead of Generation Y ... the 9/11 Generation. Not because of what happened, but because of our response to 9/11 and what that has done to define and change their generation -- just like the World War II generation."

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On Sept. 11, 2001, students pumped teachers with questions on how such horror could unfold on U.S. soil.

"Our sixth-graders were aware of it by the time they got to school," recalls Oakridge Elementary teacher Jan Rolan, who now teaches fifth grade. "The year it happened, we had to talk about it almost every day."

Many high school students watched the events unfold on classroom TVs. Schools summoned crisis counselors to reassure the distraught. Student patriotic activities and service, including collecting money and writing letters to victims, wearing red, white and blue ribbons, and creating human flags on football fields, became the impromptu fashion -- a response unprecedented, some said, since World War II.

But fears also set in for some, that dads would go to war, that moms wouldn't come home from work. Some schools reported a rise in discipline problems -- children acting out, some counselors said, because of event overload.

As the first anniversary approached, schools wondered how to mark the date without traumatizing children all over again. Some groups suggested they focus on character-building activities, community service or "21-balloon" salutes to police, fire and military men and women instead of reviving the devastation.

Five years later, some schools continue commemorations along those lines.

Oakridge Elementary hosts a Patriot Day celebration where children sing, write essays and choose a person to receive an Everyday Hero award, school music specialist Dianne Krehbiel said. This year's theme is Imagine Peace.

"I think it's a very unifying thing to start the school year," Krehbiel said. "Our music program has helped pull us together as a community, and we gather around song."

Indeed, the school's oldest children were kindergartners and first-graders when the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and teaching children details about that day can be tricky.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Some teachers wonder how it couldn't.

"One of the kids today already brought up 9/11," Rolan said just days after the school year started. "War is very real to these guys."

They don't have a lot of memory of 9/11, at least on the level adults might, Rolan said. But they know the basic event. They understand that airline security has changed. They understand concepts of freedom and citizenship. Those provide the context for Rolan to touch on the event.

Teachers of older children say they tap a similar, though more complete, mosaic of understanding.

"Sept. 11 is not something (about which) a history teacher has to say, 'Where's my unit?' It's just there," said Jenicee Jacobson, social studies teacher at Riverton High. "Everything with Iraq, with the way the government works now, with homeland security, current issues in general -- it's all woven into Sept. 11. ... It takes very little leading or prompting with questions for them to go back to that place."

Indeed, teachers are seizing on what they call "teaching moments," initiated by children and channeled into the day's lesson.

For instance, some of Jacobson's students mentioned 9/11 on the first day of school. Jacobson said it led to talk of the War of 1812, the last time the United States was attacked on its own soil, and Pearl Harbor, and whether that counted as U.S. soil, because Hawaii wasn't yet a state, though the American military was the target.

"What a great opportunity," Jacobson said. "We (talked) a little about World War II, the early 1800s and a current event. That's why you naturally go there."