By BERNIE HORNICK
SHANKSVILLE — Teaching about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is getting tougher all the time for veteran social studies instructor J.P. O’Connor of Shanksville-Stonycreek Elementary School.
In 2002 or 2003, when he talked about Flight 93, his fourth- and fifth-graders immediately had a sense of the importance of the lesson.
Those pupils had lived the story.
n They had felt their schoolroom walls sway, and had seen the ceiling tiles jump at the moment of the plane’s impact in a nearby field.
n State police didn’t want them outside disturbing – well, anything. The area was an enormous crime scene. “They (the children) knew a lot because a lot of them were not allowed out of their homes,” O’Connor recalled.
n The children knew from kitchen-table banter that experts at the Somerset Airport were trying to reassemble as much as they could of the doomed jetliner. They understood Somerset County Coroner Wally Miller was in the middle of an enormous, gruesome task.
n The boys and girls had received stuffed animals from a group associated with remembering the Oklahoma City bombing.
The Class of 2017 is different.
About 2 years old when Flight 93 crashed, they have no memories of that day. And what they hear second-hand from relatives centers on mom rushing to the babysitter to bring them home, of the lights going out and of broken windows, of fighter jets over Indian Lake.
“After the plane crash, there was black stuff all over the house,” a 10-year-old girl recalled.
That’s where O’Connor, a teacher for 19 years, comes in.
With a vivid recollection of the smoke plume, a journal, field trips and reading materials beyond the text, he tries to make the enormity of that day come alive.
He’ll read every page of “Let’s Roll” by Lisa Beamer to the class, four pages at a time.
“I teach social studies like a story,” he said.
Two of the biggest tragedies in the United States in terms of lives lost occurred in the region – the Johnstown Flood of 1889 and Sept. 11, he notes.
In class Wednesday, the hands of the fifth-graders popped up when O’Connor quizzed them on whether the passengers were heroes. The children agreed they were – even though they all died – because the passengers had saved scores of other lives at the plane’s likely target, the Capitol.
The children learn of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
“There’s enemies in the world trying to bring America down,” the teacher said. “He hates us for what we stand for, our freedoms. He’s jealous for our standard of living that we enjoy.”
One boy’s mom told him bin Laden was mad at the United States because of Americans living and working in foreign countries.
The class discusses a wide range of topics, including whether a national memorial is needed and if the government could have shot down the plane.
That’s where their surroundings can become a living classroom. For instance, O’Connor said, a local dragline operator witnessed the crash and could testify that the jet was intact before impact.
With the national memorial going up, “Your lives are going to change pretty dramatically in the next few years,” O’Connor told his youngsters.
“What happens in the world today affects these kids and they need to know it,” he said.
As to the historical lessons of Sept. 11, O’Connor hints at a loss of innocence.
“As Americans,” he tells the class, “you have to be aware of your surroundings. If something doesn’t look right to you, report it to the authorities so it can be investigated.
“There’s security everywhere now.”
