September 11th, 2001 - Class Recap

This is part of N591UA, which operated United Flight 93 on September 11th, 2001, and was hijacked for possible use against the White House. Instead, a passenger revolt forced down the plane into a field in Pennsylvania. A part of my 9/11 story is that I once flew on that exact same plane, from Portland to Chicago in 1996. Check out my FlightMemory map of lifetime flights.

Hello wonderful students,

Today, I tried to make sure everyone learned about the basics of the major events of September 11th, 2001, which happened 15 years ago on Sunday. Sometimes, I just want to focus on the moment! Here's the class recap for today:

Learning Targets:
Knowledge LT 2: I can demonstrate an understanding of the role of governments in current issues.
Knowledge LT 4: I can explain how different ideological movements and philosophies shape politics.

Soundtrack: “Wake Me Up When September Ends" by Green Day. Selected because we discussed the events of September 11th, 2001 today in class. Lyrics (which some may argue directly relate to the War on Terror) here.

AGENDA 9/11/17:
News Brief - Sarah
Introduction Video
Citizenship
September 11th, 2001
Fear

Homework: Read the blog recap! Post a comment if you have not. Next news brief: Marian.

News Brief: Sarah had the news brief today and chose this story to talk about: OPB.com - Walden Introduces Bill To Expedite Reforestation In The Gorge. We talked about how the Eagle Creek Fire relates to various different levels of Government, as well as how it started and possible ways the government can help. This was a good news brief to start us off - thanks Sarah!

Marian volunteered to do the next news brief. Any article/story about anything happening inside the United States government in the past two weeks, please.

Introduction Video/Citizenship: To start looking at our government, I played this video of high school students trying to answer questions about social studies:

We laughed at some of the responses, then I flipped the script and had the class try and citizenship test!

Here was the pre-test that I passed out in class. All sorts of good questions about how the U.S. government is structured and works.

Google Drive: United States Government Citizenship Test

It was fun to look and see what everyone knows to start the class! Thanks for following along.

September 11th, 2001: To start this section, I asked students to do a free write for about 5 minutes on the following questions:

What do you know about September 11th, 2001? What have you heard about it? Do you remember anything? What have you learned before, in class, or from parents? How did the U.S. Government change after 9/11?

After the free write time, we shared responses as a class and I told my story about September 11th. I was starting my Sophomore year at Wilson High School in Portland. It was definitely a day I will remember for the rest of my life. To drive home the point as to what the day was like, I showed this video in class, which was a timeline of the day:

From there, I moved on to discussing how September 11th, 2001 came about.

Fear: We talked about in class about FEAR. To start to look at how fear played a role after September 11th, I showed a couple of videos:

This is United States Secretary of State Colin Powell addressing the United Nations about the "weapons of mass destruction" that the U.S. government thought was in Iraq. It turned out that there were not any such weapons.

This video contains a montage of President George W. Bush and many of the key figures in his government repeating words in speeches that sounded pretty scary.

The last bit to class was another free write. This time, it was about fear in our lives. 

The prompt was: write about a time in which you experienced fear and how you felt. What did you want to do in that moment?

I wanted to make the connection between the fear much of America felt after 9/11. In fact, one of the ways that the government might have helped keep people fearful (or ready) is by making a threat level color coded system.:

In the entire history of the threat level system (which ended under President Obama), the threat level never went below Elevated - meaning we were supposed to be at "significant risk of terrorist attacks," constantly.

We will continue to investigate the role that the government plays in our lives throughout the semester.

We finished with the free write on fear, and will talk about them together next class. Thanks for your focus and participation today, everyone!