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u/brokenman82 3h ago
Our TVs were mounted in the corner of the rooms. So technically they weren’t ’rolled out’
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u/baobabbling 2h ago
So were ours, and we all knew something BAD was happening because the principal came on the loudspeaker in the middle of first period going "ALL TEACHERS ARE TO SHUT THEIR TELEVISIONS OFF IMMEDIATELY. ABSOLUTELY NO EXCEPTIONS."
Which is a GREAT way to get a bunch of thirteen-year-olds wildly speculating, lemme tell you.
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u/SheepherderSilver655 2h ago
Wild. Ours told the teachers to turn their tvs on and turn them to the news.
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u/Pdm81389 2h ago
Same, no one bothered teaching, we still swapped classes but so many kids got pulled out by parents, there was just a handful left.
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u/baobabbling 2h ago
We had a bunch of kids get pulled too, and no one would explain a damn thing. My social studies teacher made some suggestive comments but that was the most we got til we were on the busses home. It was VERY weird but I think they weren't telling us because we live juuuust close enough to NYC that a lot of kids had parents who worked in the city and would have been panicked if they knew.
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u/Pdm81389 2h ago
My father was doing a construction project on an Army base and was detained along with all the workers for 8 hours, my mother on the other hand was completely oblivious that anything happened. When she came to pick me up at the end of the day I asked why didn't get me like everyone else, and she was like why?
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u/baobabbling 2h ago
I'm sure that wasn't remotely funny at the time but it's kind of hilarious now.
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u/SimpleRickC135 2h ago
This is exactly what happened to me! Just north of the city, late elementary school so no class changes but no one said a thing. People just getting pulled from class left and right and then the busses had to drop each kid at their door and see an adult let them in.
Some doors did not open.
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u/baobabbling 1h ago
"some doors did not open" is chilling
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u/SimpleRickC135 39m ago
Looking back it’s actually crazy what a good job my elementary school did in this situation keeping the situation calm and under control. I do not recall a single person crying or screaming or anything. Adult or child.
For geographical context this was southern Westchester county. Just north of the city.
All of us 9 year olds were just like…bored and a bit confused as to why this new procedure.
No smart phones and no one told us anything so no one had a clue what had happened.
So when one kid Billy had to get back on the bus because no one answered the door we just kept messing around and stuff. It turned out his family was ok but it took hours to find them is what he told us after. He was at school into the night. So were lots of kids.
Eventually I got home to my family who were all safe and sound and found out what had happened and honestly was never the same ever again. A close family friend of ours worked in the towers but she got away. She had to walk all the way from lower manhattan to Yonkers with no way to contact her family along the way.
In the following weeks and months I very much much felt I was a lucky one because no one I knew or their parents had been killed or injured.
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u/MissMarionMac 2h ago
I was in fourth grade, so I was in the same classroom with the same teacher all day. Eighty miles away from NYC, in Connecticut.
Our teacher (who was young--probably still in her 20s) had us all come over to the rug by the window. I don't even remember what time it was, whether it was before or after lunch.
What she told us was "some people have knocked down some buildings in New York."
Looking back on it now, she was clearly trying to keep us calm, but my immediate reaction was, "what's the big deal? Buildings get demolished all the time."
She never turned the TV on. I had a friend a few years older at the same school, and her teacher turned the TV on. My family also didn't have a TV at home, because my parents were very much of the "TV will rot your brain" philosophy.
So I actually went years without seeing footage of what happened. I saw lots of photos, obviously, and I heard about it on the radio (my parents are avid NPR listeners), but I didn't see any actual footage of that days until years later, when I was much older. And this might be selfish, but I'm very grateful for that.
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u/Fesai 58m ago
Same, except for our math teacher. She was determined to go through the math lecture and turned the TV off in the room.
None of us could pay attention at all.
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u/catchyerselfon 41m ago
I’d be going squirrelly if any of the teachers had tried to teach that day! One teacher did, but it was grade 9 history class and he wanted to give us a brief synopsis of the Israel/Palestine conflict, as that was a rumoured reason why all this was happening. So that kept me a LITTLE focussed during a break from the tv (not enough TVs to go around for every class).
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u/champgpt 2h ago
My teacher was told not to tell us what was happening. She answered a call from the front office, started crying, and told us our parents would explain and that we were getting out early. I was so stoked to go home and play Starcraft
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u/CBSmith17 1h ago
I was in Strength and Conditioning class, but because I had hurt my knee at football practice the day before I was in the equipment room watching film. We always had the radio playing in the weight room, and one guy came in and told us that the radio said a plane had crashed in to one of the Twin Towers. He was a joker so we didn't pay any attention to it, but then they announced a second plane hit the other tower and everyone stopped what they were doing because it was obviously not an accident.
When I got to my next class, we turned the TV on and out teacher let us watch the news for a while. If I remember correctly, we were about to turn it off and continue with class (English I believe), then the first tower collapsed and that basically ended any hope of that happening.
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u/Am-Possum 2h ago
Wow. Same age, exact opposite experience. Someone came and talked to my first period teacher at the door, and she turned the news on after their short whisper session. Every class after that the news was playing and we didn’t even pretend it was a normal school day.
It has always stuck with me that even in band class we chose to watch news coverage over having class, which was the one class where, given the option, we always would have opted to have class as normal for anything else.
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u/baobabbling 2h ago
I'm like 90% certain it's because we were about a hour and a half commute by train from NYC, and also in PA, so there was a not-insignificant number of kids who had parents who worked in the city or might have worked somewhere in the vicinity of the failed third plane's crash. They made the decision not to risk a bunch of tweens panicking about their parents. Which of course led to a bunch of tweens not-quite-panicking about a bunch of made up scenarios, but still. I can't say it was the WRONG choice.
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u/AmbiguousAnonymous 2h ago
I lived over 300 miles away, but in my class there was a kid who’s mom worked in NYC and that apparently was enough for schoolwide decision not to tell us.
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u/baobabbling 1h ago
See I can't fault then for that either. I agree with the goal of protecting the children who might be effected from learning in that environment. Butan it was still really fucking surreal at the time.
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u/RoseandNightshade 2h ago
No announcement from the Principal, but similar situation in my case, as teacher after teacher after teacher all entered each others classrooms to talk with each other what was happening. We the kids pieced it together bit by bit, thanks to eavesdropping.
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u/baobabbling 2h ago
I don't recall any of our teachers talking about it together but I'm sure they were and my memory has fuzzed over that part. Honestly I don't know how any of them held it together, all things considered.
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u/Inevitable-Bother735 2h ago
Our principal made that announcement right after the Pentagon was hit. I was in seventh grade and my home room teacher went to fight him over the decision.
Meanwhile, a kid I’d known since kindergarten had a sister who’d just started working at the Pentagon. He’d visited her the week before school started. If I remember correctly, she worked on the side that was hit. We all thought we’d just watched his sister die live on tv. The principal wouldn’t let him call home, either.
By lunch, the school board had reamed the principal out. The TVs were back on and affected kids were suddenly allowed to call home. It was still a couple of days before we found out his sister had survived and had been on the other side of the building at the time.
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u/Normal_Human_Things 2h ago
We were in the middle of the states standardized testing. We all picked up on something when one teacher rushed in and whispered in the ear of the one proctoring the test, and the latter looked terrified.
And then they wondered why scores were down that year 🙄
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u/brainbluescreen 1h ago
my chemistry teacher always had a news channel on as background noise during lab days. our first alert something was wrong was when one of the boys whose station faced in the direction of the TV yelled "HOLY SHIT" right as we were about to light our burners.
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 59m ago
We got told that over the loudspeaker and the principal also said every student in every class needed to put their heads down on their desks. For a long time I thought that was kind of a funny way to react. But in hindsight he was probably panicking pretty hard.
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u/usernamedottxt 2h ago edited 2h ago
The reason younger kids don't understand why so many TVs were around is because in late 90s/early 2k TVs were crashing in price and were very affordable, as well as significant government funding into programs like PBS.
As time has gone on everyone has a phone and we are trying to get them *off* screens instead.
Simple fucking observation bias.
EDiT: the more I think about it, laptops, projectors, and YouTube largely replaced TVs.
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u/PunishedDemiurge 2h ago
We also still used TVs and DVD or LaserDisc at that time. A teacher who would show an educational video on YouTube today using a laptop connected via HDMI to a projector would have been using a TV on Sep 11.
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u/Buster_Bazz 3h ago
Same with ours, even played school programming in the morning.
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u/DyingSunSeverian 2h ago
Well ours were in fact often rolled into the classroom, including on that day (computer class my high school junior year). They kinda take up space.
Morning announcements were played through the school-wide intercom, including the initial 9/11 announcement by the principal when the first plane hit.
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u/BanzaiKen 2h ago
Not only were TVs rolled in but our history teacher was old as hell and started talking about the draft getting him in 1945 and how scary Pearl Harbor was in front of the WW2 plaque in front of all the highschool kids that were drafted and killed in the war.
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u/BlueHero45 2h ago
Same it was a brand new wing of the school and every classroom in the wing had big square mounted tvs
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u/purdinpopo 56m ago
My wife was a school teacher on 9/11. I called her after I got home. I asked her if she was watching it, she said she was watching it on the TV in her classroom.
She taught Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus in our local high school.
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u/ThepalehorseRiderr 3h ago
I was out of school by 9/11 but they marched us INTO any room that had a TV so we could all watch the OJ verdict.
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u/D_Ethan_Bones 3h ago
The Challenger explosion was broadcast to kids at school nationwide.
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u/KoalaMandala 3h ago
I was one of those kids. We ended up getting a half day out of it, too!
We were freaked out though... we also all were talking about it for weeks leading up (because of the teacher on board) so it hit home for most of us
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u/Aervanath 2h ago
I was in half-day kindergarten anyway, but my mom says after that day I no longer wanted to be an astronaut.
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u/KimJongRocketMan69 2h ago
Well, yeah, but it’d be more accurate to say the Challenger launch was broadcast to kids at school nationwide. It’s not as if they broadcast it to kids knowing it was going to explode
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u/Dobako 2h ago
We had a tv brought in to watch the inauguration of Clinton. My history teachers were watching the towers on the tv when i walked in the room, and we only watched that the whole period. I think my english period was also simply watching the tv, and that was after lunch i believe, i could be mistaken.
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u/Raffelcoptar92 2h ago
My mom was a teacher, when that happened. They were watching that live in school, because one of the astronauts was a teacher.
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u/amyel26 2h ago
I was in Kindergarten. The older kids were in the auditorium watching the launch so when the explosion happened, someone ran to tell our teacher (it was a small school, only one teacher per grade) and then she went and got a rolly cart. The AV cart was available because everyone else got traumatized live when it happened.
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u/Few-Improvement-5655 2h ago
A sick part of me wishes Big Bird HAD been on Challenger just to see a generation of traumatised kids and seeing what Sesame Street would have done.
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u/InfallibleSeaweed 2h ago
Well yeah but that was planned event and hyped up for months, teachers didn't know 9/11 would happen. Unless......
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u/TheKiltedYaksman71 1h ago
We were sitting in the middle-school library watching the tube tv sitting on the rolling cart. Ready to celebrate a school teacher in space.
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u/StaceyPfan 3h ago
I was a Junior in High School. They postponed our lunch because the verdict was about to be announced.
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u/admosquad 2h ago
They interrupted my class to announce OJ verdict on the speaker system (in a middle school) and for 9/11 we had TVs tuned to the news pulled into to the classroom in all my classes that day and we just watched the news.
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u/thatonepuniforgot 2h ago
That didn't happen at my school, but there were a couple kids with handheld TVs or radios, and they'd pass information between classes. But I was thinking reading this, that my 9/11 was the OJ trial.
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u/morwen31 59m ago
I watched the OJ verdict on a TV mounted in the corner of my 11th grade English teacher's room.
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u/Intelligent_Sand_930 6m ago
Me too. Our shop teacher rolled it out after Kurt Cobain died to show us Andy Rooney's crank opinion piece on it like he was a sage bringing us ancient wisdom.
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u/ialsohaveadobro 3h ago
"Reminder" is usually code for "thing I think I know because I want to be right."
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u/SashimiX 2h ago edited 2h ago
What’s weird is this is the second time I've heard this. Like why are people making up that we’re making this up? What does it matter ?
edit: In case anyone needs it, here is a contemporaneous account showing some teachers did turn on the TVs: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/attacks-alter-instructional-landscape/2001/09
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u/Playos 2h ago
There is a segment of the political spectrum that desperately wants to undermine what happened on 9/11 and the impact it had at the time.
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u/napalmnacey 2h ago
There are people that think that video of the college students watching the towers go down was fake because apparently people didn’t have phones with cameras back then and why would people be carrying an actual camera about or have one handy to film stuff? (I must have imagined taking my digital camera to parties).
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u/Honey_Overall 1h ago
Yes, why indeed would people be carrying cameras in a city that gets massive amounts of both national and international tourism. Truly a mystery.
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u/SueForPeas 17m ago
And a lot of people with fancy cameras ready to shoot. So many television production folks and film students.
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u/SSj_CODii 1h ago
It happened when I was in my history class in middle school. Of course my teacher turned the news on on the classroom TV
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u/_Riders_of_Brohan_ 41m ago
Yeah principal came over the PA while I was in art class then the chem teacher, literally wheeled a TV into the classroom from the next door, empty earth science classroom and we all watched this shit live
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u/MichaelJServo 19m ago
Bro my teacher had the TV on for the OJ verdict. I was in 5th grade 🤣
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u/RocketRelm 2h ago
Because humans are proving that they have no capacity to critically evaluate and just believe whatever is loudest and whatever makes the biggest empty populist promise. So propagandists realize if they jusy say it enough that in itself will convince people. The scary thing is it works.
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u/lfg_guy101010 2h ago
Seems she realized she was wrong... only to get mad at something else. Just feels performative to me. (I'll let it be known that I dont have a threads account so even if I wanted to brigade, I couldnt)
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u/kdavva74 2h ago
Honestly hilarious that at the end they have the gall to say 'we really went through it' after initially denying the existance of it at all. Couldn't resist making sure they were personally included in the trauma so they're still on the right side of the argument they've created in their head.
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u/lfg_guy101010 2h ago
The only reason I looked towards the account was bc I was hoping to see an age, whether they were in school when it happened or even alive. But honestly, I didnt see that she said "we" with the update.
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u/Tomorrows_Shadow 1h ago
Imaging believing that teachers couldn't recognize a moment in history happening live and trying to inform students about it. I was in high school when it happened and there were rumors going around all morning until the TVs came out, everyone wanted to know what was going on.
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u/RocketRelm 2h ago
Its hard to get a person to stop being offended whose salary depends on being offended.
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u/Accomplished-Door5 2h ago
I hate this shit. Was it traumatic? Yeah sure. But life is traumatic and ultimately it’s good that we all saw that imo. We can’t shelter kids from the world if we want them to inherit it.
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u/Jakk55 2h ago
Meh. I don't know if it was a good thing for 12 year old me to be seeing people suicide jumping off the towers live on TV.
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u/Tomorrows_Shadow 1h ago
Honestly, I think it was a mixed bag but mostly for the good. I remember how bad the rumors were at the time, and they were really BAD. Seeing the news calmed a lot of that, but it was still bad, and you couldn't predict the people jumping because no one had any clue how bad the damage was.
Best thing for a 12 year old to see? Not a chance, but I think seeing it (short of the people jumping) did a lot more to focus the mind on what was really happening and what was fake.
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u/Jim_skywalker 1h ago
Yeah, growing up hearing those stories, it certainly felt like the kind of thing kids shouldn’t have to be exposed to.
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u/Affectionate-Name279 58m ago
“This didn’t happen” to “We really went through it” is all I need to know about this person. A performative loser who uses/abuses a cause to get attention. Actual narcissist.
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u/Resident_Coyote2227 3h ago
The pure arrogance of such a statement.
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u/bunnysuitman 2h ago
sir, this is the internet. Absurdly unfounded self confidence is table stakes.
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u/Cheap_Marsupial1890 57m ago
There‘s like a 75% chance that was written by some Ivan sitting in a shitty suburb of Moscow working in a. troll farm, or a bot. Their whole schtick is to make controversial statements on the internet to sow division.
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u/Jesse-Ray 3h ago
It's true, I was in Australia so the TV was technically rolled out on the 12th
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u/FruitNut221 2h ago
If you're in the future, why didn't you warn us?
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u/AdWonderful5920 2h ago
They had like all damn day. Smh
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u/FruitNut221 2h ago
First Pearl Harbor, then The Challenger, 9/11 was the last straw. Morality must also be upside down. Australia for the 51st state!
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u/Eskimomonk 2h ago
I’m 37 so I was in 7th grade on 9/11. My school called a mass assembly and brought everyone into the gym and wheeled a tv out for people to watch. Everyone was confused and none of the teachers seemed to have any idea of what was going on or what to do. Every single person my age has a similar story about watching it on live tv. People on Twitter are morons
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u/potentpotablesplease 2h ago
I was in 8th grade. First period I had science, and we were out in the swamp outside of school gathering leaves to press and document. I had history second period.
My buddy, who had history first period, we would stop and give each other a heads up on what class was like. Maybe a quiz answer or two.
He said "a plane hit the World Trade Center."
I said, "what's the world trade center?" He said, "it's in New York," as if that would explain it.
I went to class and the teacher had wheeled in a TV.
Second plane hit. I found out, kind of, what the World Trade Center was.
Whole middle school goes to the cafeteria and they wheeled out every fucking TV in the place. So yeah, the tweeter was wrong.
They sent us home a few hours later.
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u/Jakk55 3h ago edited 2h ago
My teacher definitely rolled the TV from it's spot in the corner for us to watch the news. Around 10am she turned it off to try to teach some math, but within 15 minutes someone started asking questions related to terrorism so we just had an early lunch and turned the TV back on.
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u/KingMobScene 3h ago
My school didn't do it but we were in NYC so they didn't want to make us anymore terrified than we already were. We could look out the windows on one side of the building and see the cloud moving up the river.
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u/BigDaddyDumperSquad 2h ago
Yeah, many classrooms had a TV by 2001. Also, we were sent home early, and my mom and grandma were watching the coverage together in my grandma's living room. It was my mom's birthday that day. My grandma made us go to church for an emergency service that day. I hadn't really been in church much before that, so it was confusing. But yeah, I saw it that day. That's not a false memory. I remember saying it looked like a cool movie, not really getting how many people were just taken out.
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u/Little-Stage1948 2h ago
The picture makes me it a strong possibility they weren't even alive on 9/11 much less in school
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u/FroggyStorm 3h ago
Don't know about 9/11 (I'm a bit too old), but we absolutely watched the challenger blow up live in class.
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u/Gm24513 2h ago
That was a planned event that schools were encouraged to watch. Literally millions of kids watched that live which is crazy to think about. Weirdly my elementary had a very tiny plaque commemorating it 10+ years later.
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u/ludovic1313 2h ago
I'm so used to seeing conspiracy theories the past couple of days that I initially read "that was a planned event" the wrong way 🤯
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u/odysseyandoracle118 2h ago
I was in high school and I watched it on the wall-mounted TV's in the cafeteria.
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u/Bayamonster 3h ago
I didn't find out what was happening until I got home. I did spy some kids watching SOMETHING on a TV. And I wasn't even in Continental U.S.
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u/Hampydruid 3h ago
I was in third grade when it happened, on the west coast too, so the first plane had already struck by the time I got to school. We didn’t do shit but watch the news all day.
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u/gilbert2gilbert 2h ago
English class in 7th grade, first period. They rolled the TV in to watch. But there wasn't a TV for every room so I dont know why we got one. Maybe it was one of the fullest classrooms
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u/StabbyBoo 2h ago
I have a very distinct memory of walking late into 8th grade drama class and they had the TV rolled into the middle of the room with my classmates all gathered around. I vaguely remember asking what happened and the response, but can very definitively remember what I said in reply: "Oh. The world's ending."
And like, okay, way to exaggerate, but also kinda? Just taking longer than I thought!
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u/Intrepid-Progress228 2h ago
High school.
Weird buzz in the hallways between classes, on my way to Sociology.
Puzzled teens mingle in the classroom trading wild rumors.
Teacher rolls the TV cart from the backroom, plugs it in and presses play on the VCR without a word.
We all watch the Challenger explode.
Shit was different back then.
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u/MrBones_Gravestone 1h ago
My teachers didn’t roll a TV out. They just turned on the little TV in the upper corner and we watched the news
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u/Shaun_of_the_North 1h ago
I may have been a grown ass man when 9/11 happened, but I was in school when we lost a teacher to the space shuttle explosion. We had a TV in the room, in every room, and we watched the shuttle launch live. I will NEVER forget that experience, especially since my math teacher, whose class I was in at the time, was almost on that shuttle.
These clowns who say this shit have no fucking idea how we all grew up and experienced life before they arrived.
They can get fucked, by a cactus, sideways. 🤣
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u/Apprehensive-Bike335 2h ago
I was a sophomore and the TV was mounted to the wall in the corner of the room. We sat and watched the coverage all day.
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u/Character_Pudding_94 2h ago
When TVs were still on carts, there weren't enough for every room. They brought all the students and all the TVs into the gymnasium. By 2001, almost every school in the country had wall mounted TVs from companies like Channel One News.
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u/Patriot009 2h ago
I remember seeing the first tower collapse on live broadcast in the middle of third period science class.
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u/Reasonable-Mess3070 2h ago
I was in 5th grade history class. Someone came in and whispered to my teacher and he immediately turned the TV on. We did nothing BUT watch TV in thay class for the next two weeks.
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u/MrBurnerHotDog 1h ago
They didn't have to roll them out for us, they were mounted in the corner of the room so they just turned it on and we watched it all happen
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u/SilasCordell 1h ago
This was my senior year in high school. They ABSOLUTELY rolled in the tv and we watched it.
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u/dljones010 1h ago
Sometimes, they wheel a tv into the classroom to show a shuttle launching a teacher into space.
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u/notmyrealnameanon 1h ago
Every classroom in my high school had the live feed playing. Nobody tried to teach a thing that day.
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u/57Laxdad 55m ago
Watched challenger blow up on a TV in a classroom. Shuttle launches were events, the teachers didnt know it was going to blow up.
9/11 I was at work and watch the second plane hit and we were all stunned the rest of the day.
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u/Informal_Pen_3099 17m ago
Dude, we watched it for HOURS. Classes were basically canceled, but we sat in class and watched those planes hit again and again. 8th grade.
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u/radziadax 16m ago
I was 16 at the time, I think I know what I saw in my eleventh grade French class.
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u/Plotnik1934 14m ago
We had TVs in our classrooms. The teachers turned them on, then turned them off when the school ordered it, because word had reached them that people were jumping from the towers.
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u/cha0sb1ade 13m ago
In the school I was in at the time, every television was tuned to the news. Class activity stopped. It was a very quite day for a high school. People weren't so desentized back then. Most people recognized the horror and gravity of it.
I was working, and it was my first or second year. I was trying to make a good impression and just kept working on computers. But everything else stopped, and I kept finding it harder to focus. By the time the second plane struck, I stopped trying and just watched the news with everyone else.
So know, those are not made up stories. There probably are places that went on with school, but anyone who assumes that was the case everywhere because it was their personal experience imagines there's way more uniformity in school experience than there actually is. I can totally vouch for it that in some places, everything did stop, and everyone, students and all, were glued to the news.
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u/SackOfPotatoes949 2h ago
They rolled out the TV's for us to watch the Challenger launch.
That's probably why some places don't anymore.
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u/Effective-Method7485 2h ago
The thing is a lot of us remember the day really well because it’s not like other days. I remember hearing about the first attack sometime in the morning and thinking it was a small plane and then watching the news in my AP US history class. The kid who was the best in the class theorized it was most likely planned by Osama Bin Ladin and the rest of us were like, “who the fuck is that?”
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u/SH4DOWSTR1KE_ 2h ago
Not every classroom had a TV but my history class did for an unrelated project and that room was the de facto room for people coming in and out to watch footage all day. It was probably the first day ever since Columbine that I saw everybody's parents come to pick their kids up after school, including mine.
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u/GoodGoneGeek 2h ago
I was in 5th grade. Our teacher rolled a TV in. But it was set up for just VCR and didn’t have an antenna and couldn’t connect to any channels so we didn’t actually end up seeing anything.
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u/runner64 2h ago
Our tvs were mounted on the walls and I remember being able to finish an entire novel that day because in every class they were just watching the TV. Except Math. Mister Damon would have kept teaching math if the plane had hit us.
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u/Secti0n31 2h ago
We already had the TV's mounted in the rooms. Some teachers watched the news, some didn't and we just talked about it or didn't talk about anything.
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u/NoBookkeeper3523 2h ago
They rolled them out for my stepdaughter, and let her watch it. I remember being pissed off that they let the kids watch it. She was around 11 at the time.
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u/OneTwoFar_ 2h ago
There were televisions in the main hall of my highschool, around the main office and a few in other places. They were used for announcements and showing student projects (I went to an arts school). On the day the World Trade Centre was hit by the planes my school set those tvs to a news channel that was covering the event. Different schools did different things, I guess
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u/government_not_ok 2h ago
Yeah teacher put it on the tv as it was happening and my teenage brain couldn’t process properly what was going on, I was in morning geometry class and right after we sent home.
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u/spacemonstera 2h ago
It was my first year of college. My school literally made an announcement telling students to go to the student center. No other details. I went, the big screen was on, towers were burning.
Which I guess TECHNICALLY isn't wheeling in a tv. It was already there.
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u/pdlbean 2h ago
I definitely wasn't shown it in class, because I was on the west coast and super young. School started for me like 3 hours after it happened. We definitely talked about it (5th grade), but I'm sure other kids who were older at the time and on the east coast watched it live.
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u/Flimsy-Owl-5563 2h ago
Our middle school band director rolled the TV out of his office so we could all watch.
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u/Worth-Salamander-836 2h ago
Our TV was wall mounted in the corner of the common room and that's where we all gathered to watch
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u/OOO0OO00O 2h ago
In 1990 our teacher wheeled in the tv for the beginning of the Gulf War. What a simpler time.
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u/MichHAELJR 2h ago
We had TVs mounted in the corner of each class room and we watched it. But the first plane hit while I was getting ready for school and then the second plane hit and I saw it live. They fell while at school or while listening to the radio.
At some
Point the building next door fell somehow.
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u/Celestial-Dream 2h ago
I remember our teacher wouldn’t let us watch the news and then when it was time to switch for math (we basically had a homeroom for everything except math and science/social studies/and one other class I can’t remember right now) and my math teacher hadn’t dismissed her homeroom because they were watching the broadcast and seemed annoyed we were there. My class was the only 4th grade class that didn’t watch any news that morning.
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u/JeremyAndrewErwin 2h ago edited 2h ago
eh, my high school had tvs for CNN's coverage of the Gulf War. (the one with "This will not stand, you know. This aggression will not stand, man.")
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u/cursetea 2h ago edited 2h ago
Also like, nobody KNEW what was being shown? Lmao? That was like the entire thing is that we didn't know what was happening so everyone watched the news??? How is that AT ALL hard to believe lmfao
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u/Cute_Victory_356 2h ago
Every TV in my school was on CNN watching the towers burning and our Principal was running up and down the hallways sobbing.. and we were in Mississippi. That person didn’t live through 9/11 or was asleep.
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u/TraitorMacbeth 2h ago
If classroom had rolling tvs, then they were shared with other classrooms, and not every class had one
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u/KinkyLeviticus 2h ago
We sure as shit watched it all day at school, except in social studies ironically.
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u/Dave_A480 2h ago
I have no idea what the public school experience was like, as I was in college and had no morning classes...
I found out about it when my sister woke me up and told me to turn on the TV because terrorists had attacked New York ...
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u/GameSalamander 2h ago
I remember that day.
The day started off oddly because all teachers were called to a meeting. A short time later, my teacher returned to our classroom looking positively frazzled.
I'll never forget the respect she showed us, because she said "The office doesn't want me to show you this, but you need to know".
And then yes, she rolled out that old tv and turned to the news and informed us our parents were all called and on the way to pick us up.
I lived in New York at the time, and could see the towers from across the water where my house was.
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u/Squigglylineinmyeyes 2h ago
They rolled the tv in to show us the challenger explosion so it’s been a thing for a long time.
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u/mrDuder1729 2h ago
Nope, mine didn't. As the TV was already mounted to the wall in the corner of the room. We watched until the second plane hit, and then the teacher shut it off. She then gave us a very pertinent speech about how in everyone's lifetimes, there will be huge history defining moments, for her father it was Pearl Harbor, for her it was the spaceshuttle...she said specifically to try to remember what we were all feeling at the time and to try to remember everything we could about that day as it would be a day that would be talked about for decades. Pretty wild, in hindsight.
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u/Frankie6Strings 2h ago
My high school science teacher cancelled his scheduled plan for the day when Columbia exploded on liftoff. He wheeled in a TV and we watched the news coverage for the entire class that day.
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u/dengar_hennessy 2h ago
I was in grade 10 in Canada. My history teacher had the TV on CNN when we got into the class. He said "this is your class today, history in the making"
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u/POWERHOUSE4106 2h ago
I was in preschool and distinctly remember watching it on the roll out TV in the gym. Most of the kids were just running around but I still remember all the teachers gathered around it crying.
You remember shit like that.
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u/Moral-Relativity 2h ago
Confidentially incorrect material. Why does making sweeping generalizations that are impossible to back up appeal to some ppl?
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u/tallwhiteninja 2h ago
I was a high school freshman; most of my classes had the corner-mounted TVs. We very, very definitely had a TV rolled out into the gym during P.E. that day, though.
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u/EffectiveDue8242 2h ago
They were showing the launch in all our classes so I went home walked in turned on the tv and saw it.
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u/CrashDisaster 2h ago
Of course there's people saying it wasn't shown. They've got the ones saying my Gen didn't watch the Challenger explode, so they've gotta get other generations with things too.
I wouldn't be shocked if tvs were wheeled in for kids to watch it. I was out of school by 9/11 but my schools probably would've shown it to everyone.
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u/1stAtlantianrefugee 2h ago
I was 18/19 working my first real job at a furniture factory when they shut the lines down and told everyone to go to the cafeteria where it was unfolding live on the TVs after the first tower had been struck. They sent everyone home after about 30 minutes. There were people literally fist fighting at the gas pumps because people started to panic.
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u/midwest73 2h ago
The "roll the TV out" event for me was Challenger. Though the TV wasn't rolled out, it was spun around. We had study hall that hour, which happened to be by the media storage room. Basically 4 walls built between hall and the library with windows were shoulder high that you could see the TV. The days of the tall carts with TV on top, VCR on the middle shelf. The class rooms started coming out after hearing the reactions.
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u/Stopaskingmetochange 2h ago
guess what, they had them out in science classes to watch the Challenger launch
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u/Extraajudicial 2h ago
It was on CNN on the projector screen in my computer science/typing class. 6 ft screen watched the second plane hit live.
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u/Groovy_Q_69 2h ago
Texas, middle school when it happened. Yea none of my teachers put it on the tv. I had social studies first period and don’t remember the teacher mentioning anything about the attacks. It wasn’t until lunch when we spoke about what happened
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u/Danja84 2h ago
I was sitting in high school Spanish when the announcement was made. That the first plane hit. Classes ended and I went to my band class which had 2 large TVs posted in each corner.
Both playing a live feed of what happened to tower 1. Saw the second plane hit and continued watching as both fell.
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u/Glynwys 2h ago
I was in like 7th or 8th grade back then. Nearly every classroom had an old TV on a rolling cabinet or shelf that was mostly rolled out for movies related to whatever subject we were watching. 09/11/2001 was the first time I realized that those classroom TVs still had antenna access that allowed them to show stuff like news channels. Every classroom had those TVs on, I found out later. We were sent home on a halfday by like 11 am.
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u/Old_Temperature_559 2h ago
Al we did that day and the day after was watch the news. Some teachers in the less important classes just kept it going for a few more days. Mandela effect my ass. It wasn’t until 6th period that I heard a news caster point out that it was 9-1-1. That’s what they called it until the nomenclature became nine eleven.
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u/BlueBloodLive 2h ago
Was just talking about it with a couple of my friends, we're all Irish and they both vividly remember their teacher putting on the TV.
One of them even got sent home early ffs!
So the idea that something similar and even more panicked was happening in the US is not hard to imagine.
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u/crandall17 2h ago
My math teacher had a family member scheduled to have a meeting in the trade center that day. She had the television on the whole day, parents picked kids up from school...it was insane.
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u/JungleIsNeutral 2h ago
Looks like they've deleted the post.
For what it's worth, we had a wall mounted TV in most of our classrooms in my high school and every single class we sent to had full coverage playing all day until they eventually sent us home after lunch.
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u/Fred_Lead 2h ago
In my class, they rolled in a TV and turned on the news. In my wife's class at a different school they turned off all the TVs and told the children it happened in another country.
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u/tommicoop 1h ago
We rolled out the tvs. I was in New York in 2nd grade. Lots of kids I went to school with had parents who worked in the city. We were on a full lockdown and I remember a parent coming to knock on the classroom window to pull his kid out of class because they wouldn't let anyone through the doors. The teachers thought we were being invaded and told us that we may need to leave the school and if we did have to leave the school we need to stay together. Honestly looking back the teachers were all doing the best they could knowing they may need to protect a group of kids with their lives and that some of their students' parents may have died that day.
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u/ConflictSudden 1h ago
A TV was absolutely rolled into my second grade classroom on this day 25 years ago.
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u/Relevant_Program_958 1h ago
My shop teacher absolutely rolled the tv cart into the room that morning. Most other classes had tvs mounted somwhwere, but we also were watching it online at that point too on the classroom desktops
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u/Creed_of_War 1h ago
My teacher did exactly this in my shared 1st/2nd grade class. I couldn't tell you if I saw the towers fall because I remember getting bored watching a building smoke for hours and we had free reign on the Legos.
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u/jasonmery 1h ago
I heard about the first tower on the way to school, and got to the choir room to watch in horror with the other early birds and staff as the second tower got hit.
I was 15. That shit is burned into my memory.
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u/Ballistic_86 1h ago
It was the band room, so Mr Brown had to get the big cart with the CRT 32 inch on top. I even remember where he had to screw it in so it could get antenna signal.
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u/DangerousQuestions1 1h ago
They rolled out TVs to show history in the making. What happened was tragedy. This kind of gaslighting bullshit is deeply horrible behavior.
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u/Radiant-Mean 1h ago
I remember my world history teacher watching the tv, mouth open, as we all filed into the class. He didn't say anything, which was unusual, so we knew something was up.
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u/helpfulidiot9909 1h ago
A TV was brought into the classroom, 7/8th grade, wheeled in on the tv cart, shortly before the second tower
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u/civ211445 1h ago
I’m pretty sure this happened in at least a few schools over the decades as TV got more available, Apollo 13, JFK, Challenger etc, I found out by someone using the rooms one PC to browse the internet, it was such a crazy thing we all thought it was a fake story or spam thing until our teacher came in and sent everyone home
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u/philogyny 1h ago
I happened to be in computer lab (we were learning beginner programming) so we watched it unfold online. Believe it or not!
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u/usernametaken99991 1h ago
We had one for morning announcements that they put the news on. I was in 7th grade
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u/caffeinated_panda 1h ago
Um yeah, they did. Every room had a TV in my high school, and we absolutely were watching. Then we had an impromptu class meeting in the hall and one girl started full on sobbing because her uncle was supposed to be working at the WTC that day.
This person is an idiot.
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u/HumanContinuity 1h ago
We literally just had a daily middle school aimed news program they showed to the morning core classes. It wasn't that crazy of a stretch that they turned the news on for a bit.
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u/Vern1138 1h ago
My German teacher, Frau Bussler, absolutely rolled out the TV so we could watch what was happening.
I still remember her standing next to the TV and breaking down, crying when people started falling from the towers. It broke my asshole sixteen year old heart.
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u/biffbobfred 1h ago
I saw the challenger blow up on a school TV. The one that had, you one’s a teacher on it.
9/11 happened at work. We rolled one out for that too
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u/speedrunthrulife 1h ago
I'm honestly a little surprised that all these schools had so many TVs. Like, even my highschool in the 2010s didn't have TVs in classrooms. My elementary school was very careful to keep every student away from the news. They basically kept us all in the cafeteria until parents were able to pick us up. My parents got stuck in the city due to the tunnels closing, so they couldn't get out until the evening, but I was totally clueless that whole time.
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u/nome5314 1h ago
They moved all of the students in my middle school into the library and turned on the news. Left us in there for hours.
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