I didn’t have a Facebook page in 2001. None of us did. I often wonder what our Facebook feeds would have reflected in the light of what happened on that day. I watched the story unfold on the SKY News website in the heart of Dublin, Ireland, where I was working as the National Education Consultant for the Schools’ Business Partnership for Business in the Community Ireland. My colleagues were gathered around my little 14” desktop computer screen as my computer was a brand new Compaq and supported a faster feed to the website I was streaming down an ISDN cable.
Silence fell as we watched. Glancing out the window of my third floor office onto the busy, tourist filled O’Connell Street outside, the realization was settling in as people received texts and started to hustle into bars, shops and cafes that were now broadcasting this tragic moment in history. Our CEO came into the office and told us to go home - be with our families and after a surreal, silent train ride back to our small rural town of Maynooth that night, we switched on the television to gaze at the endless loop of the unimaginable. Though so far away, the shock of it all hit home. I looked up onto the wall of our dining room to see a panoramic image that we had bought just two years before at the Empire State Building on my first ever trip to New York City where the skyline was dominated by the Trade Center Towers. It sunk in that that view would never be the same again. Indeed, for all the people touched by that attack on New York, The Pentagon and in rural Pennsylvania that day, life view would never be the same again.
If the terror attack on America happened today with the plethora of devices that our students have in their hands right now, I wonder how we would have handled this as a school community. The graphic pictures that the students might see - the on the ground live tweets, Instagrams and images that would cross their screens instantaneously. How would we, as an education community react? Today, this event in our history is marked by a moment of silence and flags at half mast with most of the students facing me in the classroom barely understanding fully as to why this is so somber - as many were not born! So when I saw the PBS StoryCorps Animation show up in my Twitter feed on the morning of 9/11, I found myself watching the story of Richie Pecorella and his fiancee, Judy Juday. Tears rolled down my face in the school parking lot as I heard the emotional voice of the man that so eloquently spoke of his fiancee and the love he had for her and how he changed before and how he vowed to live after her death. The voices of people with the imagined story images of those animators that got to the very root of this story mesmerized me. His voice will forever live on and will engage those students that, in times to come, will learn what 9/11 was historically, but engage with that moment in our history emotionally as well.
Sir Ken Robinson says it best: “Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. They’re being besieged by information and calls for their attention from every platform: computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings, from hundreds of television channels”. (Robinson, 2012). Our jobs as educators are changing rapidly. As I complete this blog post, I am sharing the D.E.C.S with two juniors who are brainstorming for the yearbook. Between twirling the mobile laptop stand desk (evaluated as not student friendly!) the rapid fire conversation that moves from school events to the dating scene in our small town, I also wonder if our students are so over exposed that the emotions that I experienced by watching Richie’s story would be lost on the empathy sides of their brain. But then again, a quick view of Erik Qualman’s 2015 Social Media Revolution Video might give you some food for thought on that!
Bibliography
She Was the One. Retrieved September 17, 2015, from http://storycorps.org/animation/she-was-the-one/
Sir Ken Robinson. (2012). Retrieved September 17, 2015, from http://edtechnow.net/2012/01/20/sir-ken-robinson/
Social Media Revolution 2015 #Socialnomics. Retrieved September 17, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jottdmulesu