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u/ThepalehorseRiderr 16h ago
I was out of school by 9/11 but they marched us INTO any room that had a TV so we could all watch the OJ verdict.
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u/D_Ethan_Bones 16h ago
The Challenger explosion was broadcast to kids at school nationwide.
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u/KoalaMandala 16h ago
I was one of those kids. We ended up getting a half day out of it, too!
We were freaked out though... we also all were talking about it for weeks leading up (because of the teacher on board) so it hit home for most of us
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u/Aervanath 16h ago
I was in half-day kindergarten anyway, but my mom says after that day I no longer wanted to be an astronaut.
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u/Next-Accident-2970 6h ago
I wish you watched that Punky Brewster episode where they addressed it. I wasn't born around that time but I understood that it did help.
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u/KimJongRocketMan69 16h ago
Well, yeah, but it’d be more accurate to say the Challenger launch was broadcast to kids at school nationwide. It’s not as if they broadcast it to kids knowing it was going to explode
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u/Mu-Relay 13h ago
Gen Xer here. They broadcast it in school because a teacher was on it and that was a big deal to teachers.
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u/ChattahoocheeBend 13h ago
I remember the reporter saying the astronauts may have survived and to wait for confirmation. I will never forget that.
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u/Seanspeed 5h ago
What's crazy(and quite sad and terrifying) is that they likely did survive the explosion, but didn't survive the fall back to the ocean.
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u/glockster19m 4h ago
Even worse, it's believed one of them drowned
As in survived the explosion, survived the crash, and then slowly had the lander fill with water around them
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u/HighOnGoofballs 5h ago
Iirc I believe fledgling news network CNN actually paid to have cable installed in schools all over the country just so they could watch.
Folks also claim this is a false memory and they are wrong
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u/Dobako 16h ago
We had a tv brought in to watch the inauguration of Clinton. My history teachers were watching the towers on the tv when i walked in the room, and we only watched that the whole period. I think my english period was also simply watching the tv, and that was after lunch i believe, i could be mistaken.
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u/amyel26 15h ago
I was in Kindergarten. The older kids were in the auditorium watching the launch so when the explosion happened, someone ran to tell our teacher (it was a small school, only one teacher per grade) and then she went and got a rolly cart. The AV cart was available because everyone else got traumatized live when it happened.
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u/Raffelcoptar92 16h ago
My mom was a teacher, when that happened. They were watching that live in school, because one of the astronauts was a teacher.
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u/Pedantic_Pict 14h ago
Eh, not quite nationwide.
Most of us west coast kids were still on our way to school when Challenger exploded.
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u/Itsmyloc-nar 10h ago
Remember JFK assassinated? Boomer
Remember Challenger explosion? GenX
Remember 9/11? Millenial6
u/Few-Improvement-5655 16h ago
A sick part of me wishes Big Bird HAD been on Challenger just to see a generation of traumatised kids and seeing what Sesame Street would have done.
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u/TheKiltedYaksman71 15h ago
We were sitting in the middle-school library watching the tube tv sitting on the rolling cart. Ready to celebrate a school teacher in space.
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u/Competitive-Food8407 1h ago
I grew up in Florida about 20 miles from NASA. My school had a fire drill that day and we were all outside watching the Challenger live and in person as it came apart.
It took all of a week before the jokes started.
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u/admosquad 16h ago
They interrupted my class to announce OJ verdict on the speaker system (in a middle school) and for 9/11 we had TVs tuned to the news pulled into to the classroom in all my classes that day and we just watched the news.
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u/StaceyPfan 16h ago
I was a Junior in High School. They postponed our lunch because the verdict was about to be announced.
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u/Intelligent_Sand_930 13h ago
Me too. Our shop teacher rolled it out after Kurt Cobain died to show us Andy Rooney's crank opinion piece on it like he was a sage bringing us ancient wisdom.
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u/thatonepuniforgot 15h ago
That didn't happen at my school, but there were a couple kids with handheld TVs or radios, and they'd pass information between classes. But I was thinking reading this, that my 9/11 was the OJ trial.
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u/morwen31 14h ago
I watched the OJ verdict on a TV mounted in the corner of my 11th grade English teacher's room.
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u/brokenman82 16h ago
Our TVs were mounted in the corner of the rooms. So technically they weren’t ’rolled out’
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u/AdWonderful5920 16h ago
TV mounted in the rooms?
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u/erickoziol 13h ago
Yeah. Like a 12 inch crt.
Channel One.
And commercials for winter fresh gum.
The human mouth is 98 point six degrees Fahrenheit but
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u/FrighteningJibber 13h ago
Yup inter-school network for weekly updates/student reviews and well, too show the news.
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u/ThatBarbGirl 13h ago
Inside a winterfresh mouth is much... much... 🎶 CoOoOoLeR! 🎵
Icy cool flavor, icy cool breath, that lasts... and lasts...
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u/safarifriendliness 11h ago
Also if you wanted to play a movie in class you gave it to the tech guys and they’d tell you what time and what channel they would play it. Sometimes my sixth grade teacher would flip through to see if anyone was playing anything good
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u/baobabbling 16h ago
So were ours, and we all knew something BAD was happening because the principal came on the loudspeaker in the middle of first period going "ALL TEACHERS ARE TO SHUT THEIR TELEVISIONS OFF IMMEDIATELY. ABSOLUTELY NO EXCEPTIONS."
Which is a GREAT way to get a bunch of thirteen-year-olds wildly speculating, lemme tell you.
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u/SheepherderSilver655 16h ago
Wild. Ours told the teachers to turn their tvs on and turn them to the news.
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u/Pdm81389 16h ago
Same, no one bothered teaching, we still swapped classes but so many kids got pulled out by parents, there was just a handful left.
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u/baobabbling 16h ago
We had a bunch of kids get pulled too, and no one would explain a damn thing. My social studies teacher made some suggestive comments but that was the most we got til we were on the busses home. It was VERY weird but I think they weren't telling us because we live juuuust close enough to NYC that a lot of kids had parents who worked in the city and would have been panicked if they knew.
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u/Pdm81389 16h ago
My father was doing a construction project on an Army base and was detained along with all the workers for 8 hours, my mother on the other hand was completely oblivious that anything happened. When she came to pick me up at the end of the day I asked why didn't get me like everyone else, and she was like why?
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u/baobabbling 16h ago
I'm sure that wasn't remotely funny at the time but it's kind of hilarious now.
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u/SimpleRickC135 15h ago
This is exactly what happened to me! Just north of the city, late elementary school so no class changes but no one said a thing. People just getting pulled from class left and right and then the busses had to drop each kid at their door and see an adult let them in.
Some doors did not open.
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u/baobabbling 15h ago
"some doors did not open" is chilling
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u/SimpleRickC135 14h ago
Looking back it’s actually crazy what a good job my elementary school did in this situation keeping the situation calm and under control. I do not recall a single person crying or screaming or anything. Adult or child.
For geographical context this was southern Westchester county. Just north of the city.
All of us 9 year olds were just like…bored and a bit confused as to why this new procedure.
No smart phones and no one told us anything so no one had a clue what had happened.
So when one kid Billy had to get back on the bus because no one answered the door we just kept messing around and stuff. It turned out his family was ok but it took hours to find them is what he told us after. He was at school into the night. So were lots of kids.
Eventually I got home to my family who were all safe and sound and found out what had happened and honestly was never the same ever again. A close family friend of ours worked in the towers but she got away. She had to walk all the way from lower manhattan to Yonkers with no way to contact her family along the way.
In the following weeks and months I very much much felt I was a lucky one because no one I knew or their parents had been killed or injured.
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u/Fesai 14h ago
Same, except for our math teacher. She was determined to go through the math lecture and turned the TV off in the room.
None of us could pay attention at all.
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u/catchyerselfon 14h ago
I’d be going squirrelly if any of the teachers had tried to teach that day! One teacher did, but it was grade 9 history class and he wanted to give us a brief synopsis of the Israel/Palestine conflict, as that was a rumoured reason why all this was happening. So that kept me a LITTLE focussed during a break from the tv (not enough TVs to go around for every class).
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u/RookeeALding 13h ago
High school, math teacher turned it off made us take a damn quiz... turned it back on and the building started to fall. Damn lady, heartless much?
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u/MissMarionMac 15h ago
I was in fourth grade, so I was in the same classroom with the same teacher all day. Eighty miles away from NYC, in Connecticut.
Our teacher (who was young--probably still in her 20s) had us all come over to the rug by the window. I don't even remember what time it was, whether it was before or after lunch.
What she told us was "some people have knocked down some buildings in New York."
Looking back on it now, she was clearly trying to keep us calm, but my immediate reaction was, "what's the big deal? Buildings get demolished all the time."
She never turned the TV on. I had a friend a few years older at the same school, and her teacher turned the TV on. My family also didn't have a TV at home, because my parents were very much of the "TV will rot your brain" philosophy.
So I actually went years without seeing footage of what happened. I saw lots of photos, obviously, and I heard about it on the radio (my parents are avid NPR listeners), but I didn't see any actual footage of that days until years later, when I was much older. And this might be selfish, but I'm very grateful for that.
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u/champgpt 15h ago
My teacher was told not to tell us what was happening. She answered a call from the front office, started crying, and told us our parents would explain and that we were getting out early. I was so stoked to go home and play Starcraft
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u/CBSmith17 15h ago
I was in Strength and Conditioning class, but because I had hurt my knee at football practice the day before I was in the equipment room watching film. We always had the radio playing in the weight room, and one guy came in and told us that the radio said a plane had crashed in to one of the Twin Towers. He was a joker so we didn't pay any attention to it, but then they announced a second plane hit the other tower and everyone stopped what they were doing because it was obviously not an accident.
When I got to my next class, we turned the TV on and out teacher let us watch the news for a while. If I remember correctly, we were about to turn it off and continue with class (English I believe), then the first tower collapsed and that basically ended any hope of that happening.
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u/Am-Possum 16h ago
Wow. Same age, exact opposite experience. Someone came and talked to my first period teacher at the door, and she turned the news on after their short whisper session. Every class after that the news was playing and we didn’t even pretend it was a normal school day.
It has always stuck with me that even in band class we chose to watch news coverage over having class, which was the one class where, given the option, we always would have opted to have class as normal for anything else.
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u/baobabbling 16h ago
I'm like 90% certain it's because we were about a hour and a half commute by train from NYC, and also in PA, so there was a not-insignificant number of kids who had parents who worked in the city or might have worked somewhere in the vicinity of the failed third plane's crash. They made the decision not to risk a bunch of tweens panicking about their parents. Which of course led to a bunch of tweens not-quite-panicking about a bunch of made up scenarios, but still. I can't say it was the WRONG choice.
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u/nitro9throwaway 15h ago
I'm on the west coast. I saw the 2nd plane hit right after I woke up at home. School wasn't canceled, so I got a ride because I had missed the bus. News was on in all my classrooms. A couple teachers tried to teach as if the TV wasn't on. But nobody talked to us about it. It wasn't on in choir though. That's where we finally got asked how we were doing, what all we knew. Etc. Half the class just instantly broke. We were all so scared and the rumors were wild. The only cope we had was that our tiny town would be a terrible target for terrorism. But even still, we had classmates who were directly affected so we knew that didn't mean our families were safe. But yeah. It was on. All day. I don't know why people think it wasn't.
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u/Inevitable-Bother735 15h ago
Our principal made that announcement right after the Pentagon was hit. I was in seventh grade and my home room teacher went to fight him over the decision.
Meanwhile, a kid I’d known since kindergarten had a sister who’d just started working at the Pentagon. He’d visited her the week before school started. If I remember correctly, she worked on the side that was hit. We all thought we’d just watched his sister die live on tv. The principal wouldn’t let him call home, either.
By lunch, the school board had reamed the principal out. The TVs were back on and affected kids were suddenly allowed to call home. It was still a couple of days before we found out his sister had survived and had been on the other side of the building at the time.
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u/RoseandNightshade 16h ago
No announcement from the Principal, but similar situation in my case, as teacher after teacher after teacher all entered each others classrooms to talk with each other what was happening. We the kids pieced it together bit by bit, thanks to eavesdropping.
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 14h ago
We got told that over the loudspeaker and the principal also said every student in every class needed to put their heads down on their desks. For a long time I thought that was kind of a funny way to react. But in hindsight he was probably panicking pretty hard.
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u/Normal_Human_Things 15h ago
We were in the middle of the states standardized testing. We all picked up on something when one teacher rushed in and whispered in the ear of the one proctoring the test, and the latter looked terrified.
And then they wondered why scores were down that year 🙄
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u/brainbluescreen 15h ago
my chemistry teacher always had a news channel on as background noise during lab days. our first alert something was wrong was when one of the boys whose station faced in the direction of the TV yelled "HOLY SHIT" right as we were about to light our burners.
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u/baobabbling 15h ago
You know, I saw a meme earlier mocking milennials for wanting to talk about their "where I was on 9/11" story every year, and I agree that we're all pretty cringe but also...these kids just simply cannot imagine. Like I'm very much not a "kids these days" gal but...the flashpoint of trauma is so specific and impossible to really communicate to anyone who wasn't actively being formed as a person when it happened.
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u/brainbluescreen 15h ago
For bonus points, my school was close enough to a nuclear facility that we still had attack warning drills in our regular rotation, so needless to say that once it became clear these crashes were intentional, the whole staff was scared shitless and it definitely filtered down to us teenagers.
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u/thunderbird32 14h ago
Our teacher showed us a few minutes of it and then went "okay, back to work", turned off the TV, and went on like nothing important was happening.
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u/_araqiel 13h ago
Same thing here. Our teacher promptly turned the TV on to CNN, and walked up to bitch at the principal.
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u/Buster_Bazz 16h ago
Same with ours, even played school programming in the morning.
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u/OOO0OO00O 16h ago
Channel One.
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u/HomsarWasRight 15h ago
I was a HS Senior when it happened. And I remember some amount of time after, maybe a couple of weeks or something, Channel One did some sort of “tribute”. It was footage from the day set to music.
And, I shit you not, the song was Higher by Creed.
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u/DyingSunSeverian 16h ago
Well ours were in fact often rolled into the classroom, including on that day (computer class my high school junior year). They kinda take up space.
Morning announcements were played through the school-wide intercom, including the initial 9/11 announcement by the principal when the first plane hit.
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u/BanzaiKen 16h ago edited 10h ago
Not only were TVs rolled in but our history teacher was old as hell and started talking about the draft getting him in 1945 and how scary Pearl Harbor was in front of the WW2 plaque with all the highschool kids that were drafted and killed in the war.
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u/usernamedottxt 16h ago edited 16h ago
The reason younger kids don't understand why so many TVs were around is because in late 90s/early 2k TVs were crashing in price and were very affordable, as well as significant government funding into programs like PBS.
As time has gone on everyone has a phone and we are trying to get them *off* screens instead.
Simple fucking observation bias.
EDiT: the more I think about it, laptops, projectors, and YouTube largely replaced TVs.
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u/PunishedDemiurge 16h ago
We also still used TVs and DVD or LaserDisc at that time. A teacher who would show an educational video on YouTube today using a laptop connected via HDMI to a projector would have been using a TV on Sep 11.
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u/purdinpopo 14h ago
My wife was a school teacher on 9/11. I called her after I got home. I asked her if she was watching it, she said she was watching it on the TV in her classroom.
She taught Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus in our local high school.
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u/BlueHero45 16h ago
Same it was a brand new wing of the school and every classroom in the wing had big square mounted tvs
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u/ialsohaveadobro 16h ago
"Reminder" is usually code for "thing I think I know because I want to be right."
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u/SashimiX 16h ago edited 15h ago
What’s weird is this is the second time I've heard this. Like why are people making up that we’re making this up? What does it matter ?
edit: In case anyone needs it, here is a contemporaneous account showing some teachers did turn on the TVs: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/attacks-alter-instructional-landscape/2001/09
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u/napalmnacey 16h ago
There are people that think that video of the college students watching the towers go down was fake because apparently people didn’t have phones with cameras back then and why would people be carrying an actual camera about or have one handy to film stuff? (I must have imagined taking my digital camera to parties).
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u/Honey_Overall 15h ago
Yes, why indeed would people be carrying cameras in a city that gets massive amounts of both national and international tourism. Truly a mystery.
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u/SueForPeas 13h ago
And a lot of people with fancy cameras ready to shoot. So many television production folks and film students.
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u/Playos 16h ago
There is a segment of the political spectrum that desperately wants to undermine what happened on 9/11 and the impact it had at the time.
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u/GainerGaining 14h ago
What segment? Seriously asking, not trolling.
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u/Playos 14h ago
Anti-western campists is the most accurate way I can describe them.
Lately it's become popular in the secular ethnic Persians/Arabs/Turks who have a hard time squaring the predilection towards terrorism in the extremes of the Muslim faith with their heritage pride.
Anti-sematic US isolationists used to be pretty big on it as well. That's where you get most of the conspiracy theories back in the day.
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u/GainerGaining 14h ago
Thank you for the answer. That is not something I had thought about.
(I mean, yeah, the conspiracy theorists back in the day, but I hadn't considered where modern deniers came from)
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u/SSj_CODii 15h ago
It happened when I was in my history class in middle school. Of course my teacher turned the news on on the classroom TV
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u/_Riders_of_Brohan_ 14h ago
Yeah principal came over the PA while I was in art class then the chem teacher, literally wheeled a TV into the classroom from the next door, empty earth science classroom and we all watched this shit live
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u/RocketRelm 16h ago
Because humans are proving that they have no capacity to critically evaluate and just believe whatever is loudest and whatever makes the biggest empty populist promise. So propagandists realize if they jusy say it enough that in itself will convince people. The scary thing is it works.
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u/MichaelJServo 13h ago
Bro my teacher had the TV on for the OJ verdict. I was in 5th grade 🤣
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u/RateOfPenetration 13h ago
My 4th grade teacher didn’t have it on, but I knew the nurses had the radio coverage going, so I went down there to get the tea
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u/Glasseshalf 12h ago
We watched it on rolling TVs, they didn't have to roll them in because we were already watching other stuff
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u/Resident_Coyote2227 16h ago
The pure arrogance of such a statement.
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u/bunnysuitman 16h ago
sir, this is the internet. Absurdly unfounded self confidence is table stakes.
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u/Cheap_Marsupial1890 14h ago
There‘s like a 75% chance that was written by some Ivan sitting in a shitty suburb of Moscow working in a. troll farm, or a bot. Their whole schtick is to make controversial statements on the internet to sow division.
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u/Amber610 1h ago
The note also seems kinda silly. It's not wrong, but I don't like that people are using community notes as a new way to post witty gotcha comebacks
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u/lfg_guy101010 16h ago
Seems she realized she was wrong... only to get mad at something else. Just feels performative to me. (I'll let it be known that I dont have a threads account so even if I wanted to brigade, I couldnt)
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u/kdavva74 16h ago
Honestly hilarious that at the end they have the gall to say 'we really went through it' after initially denying the existance of it at all. Couldn't resist making sure they were personally included in the trauma so they're still on the right side of the argument they've created in their head.
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u/lfg_guy101010 16h ago
The only reason I looked towards the account was bc I was hoping to see an age, whether they were in school when it happened or even alive. But honestly, I didnt see that she said "we" with the update.
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u/Tomorrows_Shadow 14h ago
Imaging believing that teachers couldn't recognize a moment in history happening live and trying to inform students about it. I was in high school when it happened and there were rumors going around all morning until the TVs came out, everyone wanted to know what was going on.
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u/Spugheddy 13h ago
I was in American government and our teacher had a TV in the corner permanently. We watched it for a bit then got sent to our homerooms then an early dismissal.
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u/RocketRelm 16h ago
Its hard to get a person to stop being offended whose salary depends on being offended.
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u/Affectionate-Name279 14h ago
“This didn’t happen” to “We really went through it” is all I need to know about this person. A performative loser who uses/abuses a cause to get attention. Actual narcissist.
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u/Accomplished-Door5 16h ago
I hate this shit. Was it traumatic? Yeah sure. But life is traumatic and ultimately it’s good that we all saw that imo. We can’t shelter kids from the world if we want them to inherit it.
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u/Jakk55 15h ago
Meh. I don't know if it was a good thing for 12 year old me to be seeing people suicide jumping off the towers live on TV.
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u/Tomorrows_Shadow 14h ago
Honestly, I think it was a mixed bag but mostly for the good. I remember how bad the rumors were at the time, and they were really BAD. Seeing the news calmed a lot of that, but it was still bad, and you couldn't predict the people jumping because no one had any clue how bad the damage was.
Best thing for a 12 year old to see? Not a chance, but I think seeing it (short of the people jumping) did a lot more to focus the mind on what was really happening and what was fake.
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u/Jim_skywalker 15h ago
Yeah, growing up hearing those stories, it certainly felt like the kind of thing kids shouldn’t have to be exposed to.
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u/BlueJaysFeather 14h ago
I mean. I was almost 3 at the time and I am glad now that my parents kept me away from the news. Looking back, I knew all the adults were worried about SOMETHING but I didn’t really know what. At what age do you think that should change?
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u/Aselleus 15h ago
The generation who watched it grew up watching traumatizing movies (Neverending Story, Fox and the Hound, Land Before Time, Brave Little Toaster). We are no stranger to trauma
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u/Jesse-Ray 16h ago
It's true, I was in Australia so the TV was technically rolled out on the 12th
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u/FruitNut221 16h ago
If you're in the future, why didn't you warn us?
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u/AdWonderful5920 16h ago
They had like all damn day. Smh
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u/FruitNut221 16h ago
First Pearl Harbor, then The Challenger, 9/11 was the last straw. Morality must also be upside down. Australia for the 51st state!
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u/ExplorationGeo 14h ago
have a go Yank, you won't last a day in the outback. If the yowies don't get you the drop bears will.
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u/GoldDragon149 9h ago
We don't have to go there, we'll just rename it like the gulf of america and lake america because that's totally not stupid.
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u/Eskimomonk 16h ago
I’m 37 so I was in 7th grade on 9/11. My school called a mass assembly and brought everyone into the gym and wheeled a tv out for people to watch. Everyone was confused and none of the teachers seemed to have any idea of what was going on or what to do. Every single person my age has a similar story about watching it on live tv. People on Twitter are morons
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u/potentpotablesplease 15h ago
I was in 8th grade. First period I had science, and we were out in the swamp outside of school gathering leaves to press and document. I had history second period.
My buddy, who had history first period, we would stop and give each other a heads up on what class was like. Maybe a quiz answer or two.
He said "a plane hit the World Trade Center."
I said, "what's the world trade center?" He said, "it's in New York," as if that would explain it.
I went to class and the teacher had wheeled in a TV.
Second plane hit. I found out, kind of, what the World Trade Center was.
Whole middle school goes to the cafeteria and they wheeled out every fucking TV in the place. So yeah, the tweeter was wrong.
They sent us home a few hours later.
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u/grubas 12h ago
I was in high school. We had an assembly, a prayer, and then kids started getting yanked from school left right and center so everybody gave up ANY lie about it being a normal day.
I had 3 friends come home with me because they lived in Manhattan and had no idea exactly how to get home. 2 of them got picked up, the other one was crying all night because he knew his dad was dead.
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u/HoboJerkdown901 12h ago
We had an emergency assembly in the auditorium. My principals exact words opening words were "The country is under attack, but no need to worry!"
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u/Little-Stage1948 16h ago
The picture makes me it a strong possibility they weren't even alive on 9/11 much less in school
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u/Mothman1010 15h ago
They're a paid propagandist. They know exactly that what they're saying is false, they just get paid by how many people they can trick or offend.
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u/GoldDragon149 9h ago
No, this is an ignorant young person who didn't believe until this went viral and thousands of millenials and gen X chimed in to share their stories. She admitted she was wrong and empathized with the trauma. Not everything you see is evil.
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u/Jakk55 16h ago edited 16h ago
My teacher definitely rolled the TV from it's spot in the corner for us to watch the news. Around 10am she turned it off to try to teach some math, but within 15 minutes someone started asking questions related to terrorism so we just had an early lunch and turned the TV back on.
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u/BludStanes 12h ago
Yes, I came in late to school, I overslept and heard about it in the radio on the way to school. I told the teacher and she cancelled class and brought in the TV so this lady doesn't know what she's talking about... but we knew that already
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u/tonyrocks922 12h ago
You can see a damn tv cart in the classroom bush was reading to kids in that was wheeled over and turned on.
https://i.insider.com/574f152a52bcd021008c61de?width=800&format=jpeg&auto=webp
Dumb people seem to think everything that happened before they were born is made up or exaggerated
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u/BigDaddyDumperSquad 16h ago
Yeah, many classrooms had a TV by 2001. Also, we were sent home early, and my mom and grandma were watching the coverage together in my grandma's living room. It was my mom's birthday that day. My grandma made us go to church for an emergency service that day. I hadn't really been in church much before that, so it was confusing. But yeah, I saw it that day. That's not a false memory. I remember saying it looked like a cool movie, not really getting how many people were just taken out.
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u/KingMobScene 16h ago
My school didn't do it but we were in NYC so they didn't want to make us anymore terrified than we already were. We could look out the windows on one side of the building and see the cloud moving up the river.
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u/FroggyStorm 16h ago
Don't know about 9/11 (I'm a bit too old), but we absolutely watched the challenger blow up live in class.
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u/Gm24513 16h ago
That was a planned event that schools were encouraged to watch. Literally millions of kids watched that live which is crazy to think about. Weirdly my elementary had a very tiny plaque commemorating it 10+ years later.
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u/ludovic1313 16h ago
I'm so used to seeing conspiracy theories the past couple of days that I initially read "that was a planned event" the wrong way 🤯
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u/Bugbread 12h ago
My school didn't. We had like two or three TVs for the entire school, which individual teachers would check out to show videos. We just had class as usual, and then heard about it through the grapevine between classes (and then I think the principal may have made an announcement over the PA, but that may just be my memory playing tricks on me).
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u/Shaun_of_the_North 15h ago
I may have been a grown ass man when 9/11 happened, but I was in school when we lost a teacher to the space shuttle explosion. We had a TV in the room, in every room, and we watched the shuttle launch live. I will NEVER forget that experience, especially since my math teacher, whose class I was in at the time, was almost on that shuttle.
These clowns who say this shit have no fucking idea how we all grew up and experienced life before they arrived.
They can get fucked, by a cactus, sideways. 🤣
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u/odysseyandoracle118 16h ago
I was in high school and I watched it on the wall-mounted TV's in the cafeteria.
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u/gilbert2gilbert 16h ago
English class in 7th grade, first period. They rolled the TV in to watch. But there wasn't a TV for every room so I dont know why we got one. Maybe it was one of the fullest classrooms
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u/MrBones_Gravestone 15h ago
My teachers didn’t roll a TV out. They just turned on the little TV in the upper corner and we watched the news
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u/Bayamonster 16h ago
I didn't find out what was happening until I got home. I did spy some kids watching SOMETHING on a TV. And I wasn't even in Continental U.S.
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u/Hampydruid 16h ago
I was in third grade when it happened, on the west coast too, so the first plane had already struck by the time I got to school. We didn’t do shit but watch the news all day.
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u/Apprehensive-Bike335 16h ago
I was a sophomore and the TV was mounted to the wall in the corner of the room. We sat and watched the coverage all day.
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u/Witty-Refuse-3228 16h ago
I'm in Canada and we had it on the atrium tvs. It was everywhere.
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u/Serial7s 6h ago
TV in the corner of the room was definitely on, then they turned it off after second plane
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u/BusinessMixture9233 3h ago
They hung in the corner of every room of my high school because morning announcements were played on them. Wtf are these morons talking about.
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u/Intrepid-Progress228 16h ago
High school.
Weird buzz in the hallways between classes, on my way to Sociology.
Puzzled teens mingle in the classroom trading wild rumors.
Teacher rolls the TV cart from the backroom, plugs it in and presses play on the VCR without a word.
We all watch the Challenger explode.
Shit was different back then.
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u/Character_Pudding_94 16h ago
When TVs were still on carts, there weren't enough for every room. They brought all the students and all the TVs into the gymnasium. By 2001, almost every school in the country had wall mounted TVs from companies like Channel One News.
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u/StabbyBoo 16h ago
I have a very distinct memory of walking late into 8th grade drama class and they had the TV rolled into the middle of the room with my classmates all gathered around. I vaguely remember asking what happened and the response, but can very definitively remember what I said in reply: "Oh. The world's ending."
And like, okay, way to exaggerate, but also kinda? Just taking longer than I thought!
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u/Reasonable-Mess3070 16h ago
I was in 5th grade history class. Someone came in and whispered to my teacher and he immediately turned the TV on. We did nothing BUT watch TV in thay class for the next two weeks.
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u/MrBurnerHotDog 15h ago
They didn't have to roll them out for us, they were mounted in the corner of the room so they just turned it on and we watched it all happen
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u/SilasCordell 15h ago
This was my senior year in high school. They ABSOLUTELY rolled in the tv and we watched it.
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u/dljones010 15h ago
Sometimes, they wheel a tv into the classroom to show a shuttle launching a teacher into space.
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u/notmyrealnameanon 14h ago
Every classroom in my high school had the live feed playing. Nobody tried to teach a thing that day.
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u/Informal_Pen_3099 13h ago
Dude, we watched it for HOURS. Classes were basically canceled, but we sat in class and watched those planes hit again and again. 8th grade.
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u/radziadax 13h ago
I was 16 at the time, I think I know what I saw in my eleventh grade French class.
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u/Plotnik1934 13h ago
We had TVs in our classrooms. The teachers turned them on, then turned them off when the school ordered it, because word had reached them that people were jumping from the towers.
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u/cha0sb1ade 13h ago
In the school I was in at the time, every television was tuned to the news. Class activity stopped. It was a very quite day for a high school. People weren't so desentized back then. Most people recognized the horror and gravity of it.
I was working, and it was my first or second year. I was trying to make a good impression and just kept working on computers. But everything else stopped, and I kept finding it harder to focus. By the time the second plane struck, I stopped trying and just watched the news with everyone else.
So know, those are not made up stories. There probably are places that went on with school, but anyone who assumes that was the case everywhere because it was their personal experience imagines there's way more uniformity in school experience than there actually is. I can totally vouch for it that in some places, everything did stop, and everyone, students and all, were glued to the news.
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u/UnhappyReason5452 13h ago
So confidently wrong. Amazing.
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u/NoLibrarian7257 13h ago
It's actually frightening. These types don't care about truth, only dogma.
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u/callmefreak 13h ago
Mine didn't, but that was only because she was running out of the classroom crying after hearing the news. Also I don't think the school had enough TVs for that anyway. Since it was an elementary school I'm pretty sure the TVs were going to the fifth grade classrooms, if anything.
I asked my husband if his school rolled the TV in so they could watch it happening and he said "no- the TV was already in there." (Yes, he watched it in class.)
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u/mjsoctober 12h ago
I have a memory of my teacher showing us the Challenger shuttle launch and at saw it explode live.
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u/VixxenFoxx 9h ago
Excuse me I was sitting in the reading circle for the challenger disaster. You think they were trying to hide 9/11??
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u/DopeAsHeck 5h ago
I was in science class. Assistant principle announced over the PA what just happened. Tv was rolled from corner to front of class and turned on. We watched it live.
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u/jizzlevania 3h ago
On January 28, 1986 sooooo many kids in schools around the USA watched the Challenger explode on TVs wheeled into rooms. And immediately looked at their beloved teachers thinking "omfg that coulda been you, daytime mommy 😢"
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u/thirstposting69 3h ago
Freshman in HS. Most of the classrooms didn’t have TV service. Some teachers, most probably, kept teaching. One older English teacher turned on a radio for part of the class. Our history teacher took us into the library where they did have the news on TV for his full period, he seemed to realize more than most the degree to which 9/11 would change history for us: my generations Kennedy assassination.
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u/Patriot009 16h ago
I remember seeing the first tower collapse on live broadcast in the middle of third period science class.
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u/Cute_Victory_356 16h ago
Every TV in my school was on CNN watching the towers burning and our Principal was running up and down the hallways sobbing.. and we were in Mississippi. That person didn’t live through 9/11 or was asleep.
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u/57Laxdad 14h ago
Watched challenger blow up on a TV in a classroom. Shuttle launches were events, the teachers didnt know it was going to blow up.
9/11 I was at work and watch the second plane hit and we were all stunned the rest of the day.
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u/CalicoValkyrie 11h ago
I was in high-school and every classroom had a tv in the corner of the room, hanging from the ceiling. I was thankful for the teachers that kept them off on 9/11.
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u/Punderstruck 10h ago
I was in grade 10 and in Canada and they still rolled out the TV to watch the aftermath. We were 3h behind NYC so when school started for us both towers had already fallen.
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u/chainer1216 9h ago
I was in the school library working on a book report about the biography of Kurt Cobain when the Librarian came out and announced to us the tower was hit and told us to go to News websites to learn more.
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u/Odadelyus138 9h ago
I'm from a small town and my elementary school only had TV's in a select few rooms. They literally brought all the kids to the rooms that had TV's to watch what was happening on 9/11 lol.
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u/AdFlaky8342 9h ago
They rolled the TV into my 7th grade classroom to watch the news on 9/11 2001. As it was unfolding live. Idk wtf they're talking about. We got sent home too.
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u/Many_Consequence590 9h ago
When Waco happened, it was on the TVs in our classrooms throughout the day.
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u/Miserable_Song2299 9h ago
we didn't roll out tvs to watch it. our tvs were mounted on the wall. we played it on the tvs on the walls.
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u/Kittenn1412 9h ago edited 9h ago
So everyone in the comments saying "OOP doesn't know everyone's individual experiences"... guys the rolling tvs in grade school ran vhs tapes only, they were not wired to cable? My high school did have a cable connection in every room, but that would have been an age-appropriate situation to put on the news in school-- I know I watched Obama's inauguration, the miracle on the Hudson coverage, and the royal wedding on news coverage on cable in high school, amongst others. Like probably the teachers had the news available to them somewhere in the building, whether that was a cable connection or a radio in the teacher's lounge. I really do doubt anyone was rolling out magic tvs in front of second grades. (I am not Canadian, not American, though.) If they did have a place to plug in for cable, or mounted tvs in classrooms, that doesn't seem unlikely for some of the older grades, or high schools.
That said, we should be aware of the ways that humans can falsify memories in ways that preserve emotion. Any younger grade schoolers who claimed this memory are probably conflating the experience of the TV being rolled into the room, combined with the fact that when they know the events happened they must have been in school, with the actual real-memory emotions of the footage being on tv at home on replay for weeks. The fact that they didn't see the footage on repeat as it happened, but at home on repeat later that same day, doesn't erase how scary that was for the child just because the memory they've retained in a conflation of multiple memories into one.
My first solid memory about 9/11 that I know for sure isn't conflating together other memories is that in fall 2001 I got the chicken pox and was at home ill. It was late enough into fall that my mom had broken out the Christmas movies, and my mom tried to have an age-appropriate conversation about 9/11 over Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I didn't understand why she was so emotional about some skyscrapers not being there anymore. I do know I'd seen the footage of 9/11 early enough in my childhood that I don't remember my first viewing of it, and based on what I do remember of the conversation I think my mom probably did have it on and expect me to remember it happened, so I probably did see it at home during the initial news-cycle, but I do vividly remember that particular conversation in 2001 and only into my teen years did I look back on that memory, do the math, and realized it had happened within 2 months of the tragedy and made so much more sense why my mom thought it was a Big Thing.
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u/hammer_smashed_chris 6h ago
TBF, I was a senior in high school in Arizona on 9/11. Both planes hit before I even left my house to walk to school that morning and, though we did watch the news on Channel 1 in home hour and announcements that morning were focused on the event, there were no TVs brought out in my school to watch the news. I saw it all before I went to school because my older sister, who was in college at the time, was already up and watching the news in our living room when it happened.
I imagine the experience was different for kids on the other 3/4 of the country and TVs in classrooms did happen.
Now, there's a chance that this person was someone on the west side of the country like me, and is just too stupid to imagine things could be experienced differently by different people.
It's also possible, and more likely that this is a bot or just a really stupid gen z kid that thinks anything millennials or Gen Xers say is "cringe" and fake.
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u/Correct_Chemistry_50 3h ago
I was in a backwaters school in MS and even WE had CRT TV's mounted above the doors so everyone could watch Channel 1 every morning (Some kiddy news broadcast).
I DISTINCTLY remember a teacher rushing in and yelling "OH MY GOD" before changing it to live coverage just before the second plane hit.
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u/KyliaQuilor 1h ago
My third grade classrooms did have TVs.
We didnt watch 9/11 live. The full details really didn't trickle down to me until the next day.
But I know people who did see it happen at least partially in school
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u/drybeater 1h ago
We were in art class. Every room already had a TV in the top corner for announcements, when we came back from art class it was already on the TV and our teacher told us what had just happened.
And then 9yr old me watched the world go insane.
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u/No_Thought_3099 1h ago
We were all brought to the cafeteria, which had the only TV, so we could watch the news after the first tower was struck. I remember seeing the second plane hit.
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