I had been a 9th grade English teacher for ten school days, two hands' worth of experience in guiding and instructing the young people of South Hayward, California. I say "young" when I was just eight years older than they were. I graduated from college in May 2001, turned 22 in June 2001, and started the first day of school as Ms. Estrada on August 27, 2001, armed with an emergency teaching credential and six weeks of training. Apparently, more seasoned teachers specifically ask not to teach 9th grade, which was fortunate for me who wanted to teach 9th grade exclusively. They didn't want to deal with non-academic behavior like immaturity or silliness or cluelessness whereas I was trying to put as many years between me and those shiny little faces. No way I could project authority with seniors whilst being mistaken for one on a daily basis.
I had also just moved in with John, first time living together, and was commuting from Richmond. Waiting for my first paycheck as a salaried adult as proof of income, I couldn't buy a car yet and took BART to work, up at 5 a.m. to dress, eat breakfast, and catch the bus to the train station. One way took about an hour because I was going from one end of the route to nearly the other end, from the bottom of the North Bay to the top of the South Bay. Over those first ten days, I spent my time reading or listening to music, trying not to fall asleep, as it was still dark out and the white noise of the train lulled me.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I went through what had become my pre-school routine. I usually put the morning news on while I ate breakfast, mostly to check the weather and make sure BART was running on time. Putting on my jacket and slinging my teacher tote over my shoulder, I was about to turn the TV off when breaking news showed a plane hitting one of the towers at the World Trade Center in NYC in broad daylight. My immediate thought was that the pilot must've had some medical event like a stroke or a heart attack and lost control of the plane. It was a clear day there, no fog to blame like we may have here in the Bay Area. A medical event was the only thing that made sense to me. I had a train to catch so I turned off the TV and headed out, saying a quick silent prayer for the folks on the plane and in the building.
The South Hayward BART station is about a mile from campus, and the walk was a useful time to wake up and mentally prepare for another day of my new career; I hadn't given the plane crash a second thought. I didn't wake up John to tell him about it because it was all the way across the country and was just a sad accident. When I got to school, I threw my stuff onto my desk and printed out some sheets that I needed to photocopy. I was alone in the copy room, happy to not have to wait for an open machine, when my fellow new teacher Ms. Russow came in crying. By that time, it was a bit after 7 a.m. on the West Coast, and the first bell was set to ring at 8 a.m. I was confused and concerned that my new friend was crying at least in part because this was the time we used to get our game faces on. We can't walk into a classroom full of 14-year-olds crying or looking like we've been crying. We're the adults in the room now, and we must project confidence.
When I asked her what was wrong, then it was her turn to be confused. She asked if I had heard about the plane crash at the WTC. I said I had and that it was sad, but I didn't see how it could be upsetting enough for us to cry about it thousands of miles away. I didn't know yet what had happened between the first plane hitting and that moment in the copy room, two hours later. In 2001, I didn't have a cell phone and smart phones didn't exist, so once I left the house, unless I listened to the radio in a car or happened to pass a TV on my commute, I had no way of knowing what was going on anywhere. She said we needed to turn on the news because there were more plane crashes and they might be targeted attacks. In the two hours I was disconnected from the world, the South Tower had been hit, the Pentagon had been hit, the South Tower collapsed, and a plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. We turned the news on in time to watch the North Tower collapse live on television. It was around 7:30 a.m. at that point, we had students about to walk in, and it struck me again. We're the adults in the room now, and we must project confidence.
The first bell rang, and I still had the news on in my classroom. I hadn't absorbed what was happening on the other coast so how it would affect us over here also hadn't entered my brain. I did not anticipate that so many students would be absent. I did not know that BART shut down entirely, stopped all trains from running, soon after I had gotten off at my station. I did not know that major bridges in the Bay Area were also closed. So between parents either not being able to get to work or fearing for their child's safety, I only had about half of my expected attendance. We all sat in stunned silence watching the news, all day, no lessons going to plan, but learning nonetheless.
When they did speak, my students only had questions. And I had no answers. As a new teacher, a very young one at that, this was not the vibe I was going for. This was not like the teacher savior movies at all. I was not yet a font of wisdom, reassuring them and giving them strength. I wore "teacher" clothes and carried my school keys around my neck in a superficial attempt to project age and gravitas, trying to distinguish myself from actual children. September 11, 2001 magnified everything I did not know and had not experienced and could not explain. My true error was thinking I was the only one feeling that magnification.
Once we had a better understanding on the full spectrum of events that occurred that morning, my absent students returned, and we spent the rest of the week watching the news and talking and crying. During the six-week teaching bootcamp over the summer, an instructor shared an old adage that respected veteran teachers swore by: do not smile for the first semester. This is how students will know you mean business and will form the foundation of your classroom management. No one could have foreseen the levels of meaning this adage would hold for us in our first two weeks. I knew to look fierce and commanding by not smiling, but I had to give myself permission to cry in front of my students because they needed to see me cry with them. All the work I was doing and thought I was putting into setting myself apart from them was exactly the wrong lesson they needed in that first post-9/11 week. They all needed to see my outward expression of feeling to know that we were on the same team, but my Muslim students especially needed it.
Anti-Muslim sentiment picked up almost immediately all over the country, and the Bay Area was no exception. I could not and did not tolerate bullying in my classroom, but 9/11 was my first test of tolerance. I had anticipated bullying scenarios based on a student's outfit or haircut or size, but connecting a student's religion to an act of terrorism had occurred to zero of us 1st-year teachers. Again, no teaching manual existed that could have prepared us for this so I had to follow my students' lead and let them show me what they needed. My Muslim students needed compassion and support, and my students who blamed Muslims broadly for the tragedy needed clarity. They learned that the Islamic faith at its core does not promote violence against anyone, including the United States of America. They remembered that their fellow 9th-grade classmates who happened to be Muslim were the same ones that they did Field Day with in 5th grade, the same ones they went to the Chuck E. Cheese birthday parties with, the same ones they watched the news with the week before. They learned that there were U.S. Muslims in the World Trade Center who died along with non-Muslims. They needed the reminder that we have more in common with each other than not, but the reminder was needed because they weren't seeing that outside of my classroom.
The events of September 11, 2001 disrupted my precious, painstakingly prepared plans, wanting nothing more than to be English Teacher of the Year as a rookie, and instead drastically changed the trajectory of the teacher I would become. I am not a bottomless source of information, and my students are not eager baby birds waiting to be fed this knowledge. We are each a whole person with feelings and dreams and lives outside of the classroom, and I am only sorry that a tragedy of this magnitude, that I carry with me still 25 years later, was how we learned this lesson. I think of my first students often, and some of them may be reading this now. I want them to know that I learned just as much from them as they did from me, I am proud to have been their teacher, and I am grateful to have been part of walking them through that first month of high school because they walked me through it, too.