REMEMBERING 9/11:Learning in shades of 9/11

A day or two after the worst terrorist attacks in American history, Eva Wagner stood in her kindergarten classroom at Woodland Elementary School, watching the twin towers fall again and again. The image came not from a television screen, but from the play area of the classroom, where a boy was busy making skyscrapers out of blocks and knocking them down with a toy plane.

“That’s how kids deal with things at that age,” Wagner said. “They dress up. They play out things to deal with emotions they don’t know how to express.”

Since then, the attacks have barely come up in Wagner’s classroom. The children who filled her classroom that week are now entering the fifth grade, while some of her current students may not have been born when the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Over the last several years, Wagner has had her students draw pictures to send to troops in Iraq, but discussion of the war on terrorism is nil.

With the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks coming Monday, America’s most infamous day is gradually slipping into history — at least as far as younger children are concerned. When schools in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District honor the deceased, most of them choose to do it in an abstract sense. The phrase “9/11” may be deeply entrenched in American lingo, but on the school calendar, it’s Patriot Day.

For a gallery of staff photos from five years ago, click here.

“Kids sometimes ask” about the terror attacks, said Pat Insley, the principal of College Park Elementary School. “The teachers then mention briefly that that event happened five years ago and a lot of firemen and policemen and other people lost their lives due to a terrible event that happened in New York City. Even the concept of New York City is foreign to a lot of these kids.”

Every year on Sept. 11, College Park holds a moment of silence after its flag salute and rings three bells. Other schools have memorialized the dead in their own ways. In the days following the attacks, Adams Elementary School began leading classes in singing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” every Friday by the flagpole. The school had to discontinue the practice due to Measure A construction, but Principal Candy Cloud said she planned to revive the song on Monday.

Mary Manos, the principal of Andersen Elementary School, spent Friday morning visiting classes at every grade level and making a short speech about Monday’s anniversary. She asked all students to wear red, white and blue in memoriam, but reserved most of the historical aspects for older grades.

“When I went around to classrooms, the sixth-graders understood,” Manos said. “They thought it was a good idea to wear red, white and blue in honor of 9/11. I don’t know if other grades understood it as much, and I don’t want to go into too much detail with them.”

According to Newport-Mesa school psychologist Diana Hensley, it may take a while before young minds can understand the details of an event like Sept. 11. At a later age, she said, kids can work out the political aspects of a tragedy, but younger ones are more apt to see it in black and white.

“Little kids tend to think more in terms of ‘This is a friendly person; this isn’t,’ ” Hensley said. “For their own survival, they have to think that. So they tend to lump it into ‘There are some bad guys who want to hurt us.’ In general, they’re going to repeat their family’s perception and society’s perception, but younger kids tend to think more in terms of ‘good guy, bad guy.’

“So do many adults, for that matter.”