Finish the school day? In Eastern US time zone, it was in the morning, and actually started just before class, near the start of the day. Folks had arrived early, somebody heard about it from somebody else and rushed to get a TV so we could watch it live. At the time, it wasn’t entirely determined to be a “banal accident”, it was, well, it was live news more than anything. Everyone was glued to the screen as folks were trying to figure out what was going on. There were reports of a plane off course, and frankly what ran through some people’s minds were, “are we next?” The cellphone grid was strained to capacity not just in New York but just about everywhere, there was this palpable sense that the world had changed in some kind of fundamental way. It hadn’t, not really, but it was a shock.
You know on movies where they show the world ending, or devastation or even the atomic bomb’s aftermath, etc. It was that kind of “I can’t stop watching,” going on, where you know the likelihood it will affect your life directly in a negative way is pretty low, but you want to know more, see what happens next, or if it will affect you too.
It’s maybe a bit different now — we’re overwhelmed with so many information sources that... it’s possible the modern day equivalent is all being on the same Reddit thread or Twitter feed or live stream of an event.
Generally classrooms are meant to be a mixture of real events and things you can learn from them. If I recall correctly, this was an art class, or maybe an English class, but a humanities class of some kind, and so part of the activity was actually meant for conversation afterward. But... it unfolded in a much more dramatic way, and ... I think had there been more evidence that it was a criminal act from the start, we might not have—-ah, well, the use of airplanes as weapons was entirely new. What can I say, it sounds like any other event now, and somehow less shocking than people using IEDs, vehicular homicide, mass shootings or unjust violence, but... it unfolding live in the largest city in the world, the centre of finance, it... was still a horrendous act. The tragedy was only made worse by what followed in “revenge” and the changes to laws that we still live under today. I remember thinking a year previously that there’s no way 1984 could happen as I’d read it, and then I re-read it around a decade later and discovered it had already happened, partly thanks to Prism and other intelligence agency sharing agreements we’d been living under for years. The biggest shame is that folks knew about it in advance and yet we didn’t even have safely locked cockpit doors at the time. Who would have thought that hijackers wouldn’t simply want to send the plane somewhere else but to...