Des Moines, Iowa — In West Des Moines, Iowa, roughly 1,100 miles from Ground Zero, history teacher Ann Krois is tackling one of the most defining moments of the past half century.
“Teaching students about 9/11 is critical,” Krois told CBS News. “I want them to understand what their previous generation experienced, that trauma, and how an event like that brought millions of people, not even just in the United States, but globally, together.”
Krois was in the third grade and had never even seen a skyscraper when terrorists turned four airplanes into weapons, killing almost 3,000 innocent people — a catastrophe that’s now history class for eleventh graders like Fitz Carpenter.
“I actually learned some new stuff. I didn’t know how many people were evacuated on the boats,” Carpenter said.
To develop her lesson plan, Krois joined a group of teachers from all over the country this summer at New York City’s 9/11 Memorial and Museum. It’s part of a program designed to teach teachers what happened at Ground Zero from those who were there.
That includes people like retired firefighter Bill Spade, the sole survivor of Staten Island’s elite Rescue 5. He was one of the last men to evacuate the north tower before it collapsed.
“I can see the smoke coming from that first tower, that North Tower,” Spade said at one of the sessions for educators. “I hear the chief say, ‘We need four more rescues here and we have jumpers.'”
In Alabama, Chris Theilacker carries a different perspective. Just age 25 on Sept. 11, 2001, the young Army officer deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan following the attacks. Today, he’s a high school teacher, passing along lessons of the global war on terror and of the resilience that followed.
“It’s one of those watershed moments in U.S. history,” Theilacker said. “It must be taught, the patriotic side of it, the messy side of it. It’s a great rallying moment for what we can achieve when we decide to work together.”
Krois believes that every teacher in the U.S. should be required to talk about 9/11.
“I know it’s hard to try to teach on September 11th to students, because, you know, some of them, it’s just their second week of school. But at some point, it definitely needs to be every state’s standard,” Krois said.
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