9/11 – a teachable moment

While incidents fuelled by anger flared on the ninth anniversary of the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers, teachers across America spent time teaching tolerance.

A coalition of ‘9/11’ organisations created age-appropriate lesson plans in subjects ranging from art to social studies, available online at www.911dayofservice.org. Thousands of teachers reportedly downloaded the plans, said major US news sources. The focus of the lessons is ways that students could consider acts of service to turn tragedy into opportunity. Says Captain Tom Daniel, a retired career Navy man teaching at W.P. Davidson High School in Mobile, Alabama, who shared with his students his own experience of evacuating from the Pentagon on 9/11: “The most important lesson is pretty much what we emphasise every day – and that’s being good citizens.”