Canadian Teacher Remembers 9/11

I’m physically unable to take 9/11 seriously, entirely because my grade 9 English teacher was bizarrely obsessed with it. We basically had an entire unit on 9/11. We watched that documentary from those students that were doing a documentary of firefighters and wound up getting the only footage of the first plane hitting. We did a novel study of a book about some kid being in one of the towers for two year to work day and him and his dad squeezing past the wreckage of the plane to escape in time. We watched that Nic Cage movie of him being a firefighter during 9/11 that gets stuck in an elevator shaft when the place collapses. I am dead f*cking serious, we had to make up fictional people that died in the attack, write an obituary for our 9/11’s, and then write and deliver a eulogy as their grief-stricken parent. At one point in the unit the teacher clarified that she hadn’t personally lost anyone to the attack, nor was she anywhere near New York when it happened. She never bothered to ask if any of us had actually lost someone in the attack, which kind of seems like a thing you should do before making us invent fictional victims to eulogies for. The unit began with her demanding to know where we all were on the day of the attack and what we remembered, and she started crying when we told her that 1. we were two years old at the time and couldn’t remember shit fuck, the closest thing was one of the older kids of thought they remembered being very confused at adults freaking out over the TV but that could have been literally anything, and so this meant that 2. we were the last class she would ever teach that could possibly remember 9/11. Probably didn’t help that someone pointed out that we were the class born in 1999, so in two years she’d have students that hadn’t even been born during 9/11. That may have contributed to the teacher crying over the whole thing. We’re Canadian.

A Canadian person recounts an English teacher’s bizarrely intense obsession with teaching about 9/11 to a class that was only two years old at the time. The teacher assigns documentaries, a novel study, fictional victims, obituaries, and eulogies, then cries after realizing the students cannot remember the event and are her last class born before it. The joke is the absurd mismatch between the teacher’s emotional investment and the students’ complete lack of personal memory, ending with the deadpan reminder that they are Canadian. EN: A Canadian person recounts an English teacher’s bizarrely intense obsession with teaching about 9/11 to a class that was only two years old at the time. The teacher assigns documentaries, a novel study, fictional victims, obituaries, and eulogies, then cries after realizing the students cannot remember the event and are her last class born before it. The joke is the absurd mismatch between the teacher’s emotional investment and the students’ complete lack of personal memory, ending with the deadpan reminder that they are Canadian.

• @rzeczyzabawne / 1773 2022-09-11