Comments | lady_lilith: (без темы)

lady_lilith

(Untitled)

Sep 11, 2011 02:49

My school sent out a notice to all teachers that in our classrooms, we're supposed to take some time to talk about September 11, 2001. Almost all of the children in the class were born in 2000 or 2001. This is not something they have in their memories and I had to stop and wonder if they needed to either. Do we need to teach them about this? It's a ( Read more... )

life, history, school

Comments 3

lady_death September 11 2011, 13:39:30 UTC

My thoughts are that if teachers do talk about it do they ever talk about the aftermath? Do they then broach the racism and xenophobia that followed? Arrests with no warrants and trials with no juries of their peers due to the Patriot Act? Do they talk about how people protested full body scans at the airport? And that we still have soldiers in the Middle East? I have no idea how you could present the whole event and what it did to America fairly or in a way that ten year olds could comprehend it.

lady_lilith September 11 2011, 14:37:56 UTC

That's the thing. There is no way to explain that to ten year olds in a way that they can comprehend without scaring them and without my own political bias shining through. It's not just about this day, it's about what life was like around it. I think high school teachers can and should explain it, because they can get into all that and their students can comprehend, but mine? No, I don't think there's a way to do it well.

lady_death September 11 2011, 19:33:54 UTC

I was thinking how mad I was when I got to high school and realised how watered down or plain wrong the history that had been taught to me was. It felt like being lied to. And my personal opinion is that if you can't teach something with the nuances it deserves at a particular age than it's better to wait and explain it when it can be told and analysed from all angles. Like you said a high school teacher is much better equipped to get into that. I wonder though if any New York elementary school teachers have blogged about this because you can't avoid something that your kids can walk past. When we were in NYC last October it was a gaping scar on the city. How exactly do you explain that if you teach in the boroughs?