On Sept. 11, 2001, 2,977 people in the United States were killed in a series of attacks led by the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, a leader of al-Qaeda, believed that the United States was weak enough to attack after witnessing several failed U.S. military movements in the Middle East. On that day, members of the terrorist group hijacked four domestic flights on the East Coast. Two of these planes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York City, another plane was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and the final plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Today, many people keep the memory of Sept. 11 alive in order to educate future generations of the tragedy.

After 24-years, Sept. 11 is still being discussed in classrooms and within the halls of Tuscarora High School. Many teachers still remember firsthand how they felt about the event. Marla Lively, a mathematics teacher at Tuscarora High School, recalled that, “We didn’t know if we’d still have freedom, or if we would be demolished in a lot of ways, and we didn’t know if it would be safe to walk down the street anymore and that kind of thing.” Similarly, English teacher Krista Reddington explained she felt “shock”, “disbelief” and “confusion” when she learned about the attack. These three emotions were experienced by countless others on Sept. 11 and the days that followed.

However, despite many remembering the Sept. 11 attacks, a large portion of the United States population can’t. From 2002 to 2023 alone, over 87 million people were born without firsthand accounts of the attacks (Statistica.com). This generation has learned about the tragedy during dedicated classroom lessons. These lessons usually describe the three attacks and some background of Sept. 11. Even though these lessons are meant to be beneficial, the repetition of this information may have desensitized, or otherwise numbed, students to the tragedy as a whole. Aaliyah Goode, a Tuscarora High School senior, explained that, “I think they cover the same things every time, but it’s not really new, and I think as kids they kind of overloaded us with all the info.” Goode explained that the lessons on Sept. 11, especially in younger grades, can be “a lot to take in at 10-years-old.” When asked about students being desensitized, Tuscarora High School history teacher Jennifer Creter could understand why, “I understand that for a lot of my students it’s a historic event. They didn’t see it personally like a lot of their parents have and so you don’t necessarily have the same feeling towards it.”

Despite this numbness to the tragedy, students at Tuscarora High School agree that it’s important for Sept. 11 to be discussed. The issue remains on how to best teach the younger generation in a way that will connect with them. An anonymous junior expressed dissatisfaction with the current lessons, “There’s a big impact of Nine-Eleven, and they don’t often show that in the history lessons we get in school.” For students, it seems that the Sept. 11 lessons should be expanded upon. Another anonymous junior explains it best, “[The lesson] gives like a surface level lecture, but they don’t get into the cultural impact, or why it happened or how it happened even. They just say, ‘here’s what happened, moving on.”

Sources

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     Dictionary of Psychology. Retrieved September 11, 2025, from

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• Anonymous Junior, & Anonymous Junior. (2025, September 9). [Personal interview

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• Britannica. (n.d.). September 11 attacks. Britannica. Retrieved September 11,

     2025, from https://www.britannica.com/event/September-11-attacks

• Creter, J. (2025, September 9). [Personal interview by the author].
• Goode, A. (2025, September 9). [Personal interview by the author].
• Korhonen, V. (2025, July 2). Number of births in the United States from 1990 to

     2023 (in millions). Statista. Retrieved September 11, 2025, from

     https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/

     number-of-births-in-the-united-states-since-1990/

• Lively, M. (2025, September 9). [Personal interview by the author].