Thank the good Lord it is Saturday morning. It has been a long, stressful week. Both school wise and otherwise. Hopefully things start to look up (I know, I said that the last blog post). I have a feeling they will but it will just take time, and patience and I are not getting along too well.

As we speak, I am glued to the History Channel reliving 9/11. The memories, the stories, the pain, the heartache, and the overwhelming sense that I have lived through one of the most defining moments our country has ever seen. I know it seems morbid that every year I continue to relive that awful day, but I do it because I don't ever want to forget what happened; the emotions I felt watching it happen, and the palpable feeling of an entire nation experiencing the same thing at the same time. Shock, fear, uncertainty, sadness, anger. I will never forget seeing the constant stream of photos posted by family members, desperately seeking out lost loved ones that were still missing. Clinging to one last bit of hope.

My 8th grade students were 4 years old when it happened. They have no idea. They may have been told what happened, but they don't understand it. They can't possibly. I am so glad my CT and I share the view that they should be exposed to some of those images. The video of the plane hitting that second tower. The people running desperately for their lives. We both shared our stories (fittingly, I was an 8th grader when it happened). As a history teacher, it was a strange experience to teach a history to students that have no recollection of something that I do. It is history to them. It is reality for me. It is strange to think that in just a few years I will be teaching students who weren't even alive when it happened.

9/11 changed my entire world, and my family's world. At the time my oldest brother was in the Marine corps. I knew the minute it happened that his life would change. In the years that followed, the enlistments in my family increased. This came as no surprise, as even before 9/11 we had expected it to happen. But enlisting meant something entirely different after 9/11. At least 7 deployments later, tears shed worrying after news of 14 Marines in my brother's battalion being killed, waiting for a Marine in dress blues to show up, humvees and strykers being blown up on a semi-regular basis...well, you could say life hasn't turned out the way we expected it to on 9/10/01.

Please, please, please remember. Relive the images. Relive the heartache. Tell your kids about it (if they're old enough). It is odd to think that one day I will be my grandmother's age and people will be asking me about where I was on 9/11, just as people ask her where she was on 12/7. Have a story to tell. Personal accounts are what make history. Textbooks can never tell the story the way that you can. I even encourage you to write it down. Save it for future generations that you will not be around to tell. It sounds so dramatic for me to say that, but I spent this summer reading diaries from 19th Century America and it was extremely powerful to read the accounts of an individual.

What do you remember? Where were you? What were you doing? What did you feel? How did it change you?