Trent Nettles was a toddler on Sept. 11, 2001.
Now 27, Nettles is an 11th-grade Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher — too young to remember the day but responsible for teaching it to students who weren’t yet born when it happened. His challenge was to make this lesson more than just another unit on the syllabus.
Nettles told his students this week at Alliance Cindy & Bill Simon Technology High School in Watts, “I just remember, as a kid, that there was a lot of chaos. That’s all.”
Twenty-five years after the attacks, the anniversary has crossed a generational threshold. In a growing share of American classrooms, 9/11 is part of a past era, often taught by teachers with little more memory of it than the students in front of them. Some do recall the morning but struggle to convey the magnitude of pain and fear to students for whom 9/11 is another date in a social studies course timeline.
The shift begins in early childhood, when children may first hear the date amid adult conversation or catch a newsflash. It runs through middle and high schools, where teachers debate how much of this history adolescent and teen students can absorb — and into college lecture halls, where professors who once taught 9/11 as a current event now teach it as decades-old history.
1. A military helicopter flies in front of the Pentagon Sept. 14, 2001, in Arlington, Va., at the impact site where a hijacked airliner crashed into the building. (Stephen J. Boitano / Getty Images) 2. A student types responses during a lesson regarding the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 in Alliance Simon Technology High School on Sept. 9. (Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
And inside their homes, parents find ways to impart their own lessons, translating trauma into family history.
For Heather Matula, an Atwater Village parent of three, 9/11 is personal.
She and her husband lived in New York then, and have talked with their children — a 9-year-old and two 15-year-olds — about it since kindergarten. Her brother-in-law evacuated a subway stop near the Twin Towers and walked over the Brooklyn Bridge as the soles of his shoes melted from the ground heat, she said. A college classmate died after stopping to help a pregnant woman down 72 flights of stairs.
“We talk about the charred papers dancing down from the sky to the sound of sirens in every direction. … We want our kids to know this happened, it was deeply tragic, but that people rallied together.”
The generational distance that has muffled the pain of 2001 is also seen in California’s varied educational approach. A 2021 state law encourages, but does not require, a moment of silence each Sept. 11. It leaves instruction to districts and teachers, with optional discussion prompts for 10th grade world history and senior-year American democracy classes. At least 40 states now suggest schools address the anniversary, but how varies widely.
LAUSD Superintendent Andrés Chait will join a Sept. 11 ceremony at Pacoima Middle School. Education Secretary Linda McMahon issued a letter Thursday calling on every school in the U.S. to observe a moment of silence Friday, saying “we cannot allow the acts of great heroism, sacrifice in service to our nation, and profound loss endured by so many to be forgotten.”
On college campuses, the day is now often observed through academic discussions instead of memorials. In Westwood, UCLA is hosting a two-day symposium on the “legal, political, social, and technological transformations” spurred by the attacks. That’s drawn criticism from some survivor families and right-wing media over a panel featuring a lawyer who has represented Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused attack organizer long held in U.S. detention. In Malibu, Pepperdine University will hold a memorial display with nearly 3,000 flags honoring victims.
When 9/11 meets the AP history syllabus
Nettles folded a 9/11 lesson into a unit on the Columbian Exchange — the trade of plants, animals, culture and disease that began after Christopher Columbus’ 1492 voyage.
Broadly speaking, he said, “there are people who are trying to spread their religion. There are people who are trying to extract resources from other communities, and then there are people who want status.”
“How do we get from the Columbian Exchange to Al Qaeda? What would motivate people to create a terrorist group? Why would America be a target?” he asked his class. Nettles told students their youth could be an asset in the discussion “because it’s going to look different to people who were alive at that time.”
U.S, history teacher Trent Nettles speaks Wednesday to his students during a lesson about 9/11 at Alliance Simon Technology High School.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
Kenji Caldwell, one of his students, gave his perspective.
“Because we just heard tales of it, I feel like our generation would be more open to hearing the other side of the attacks and understand why they would feel the need to cause a large outrage to get attention from the governments,” he said. “It’s important for every generation to look at 9/11 because it expresses that our world today is led by problems that seemingly have no effect on us, but over time they will do devastating damage if not recognized.”
The experiences and reflections vary by schools and within schools.
Kyle Faeldonea, a sophomore at Blair High School in Pasadena, said he first learned about 9/11 online as a younger student. He didn’t grasp its weight until a middle school teacher described watching the attacks unfold.
“He talked about how it caused fear, how it felt really recent and how it’s still a thing that affects modern day in America,” Kyle said.
Examining 9/11’s legacy at colleges
Nihal Khan, a UCLA PhD student in Islamic Studies, felt a similar distance teaching an undergraduate course on the history of Islam and Muslims in the United States last spring. “That’s where it hit me: I’m old,” Khan, 35, said.
He said the memory shift is changing how the anniversary lands for a generation of Americans, including Muslims, many of whom no longer see it as a defining event of their lives because of how it shaped stereotypes about Islam.
Khan’s views are shaped by his upbringing in Paramus, N.J. — close to Manhattan — his Muslim faith and job as a chaplain on top of his doctoral studies. But 9/11 barely registers with Muslims he counsels. “They’re more concerned with graduating in the face of everything that’s happened post-Oct. 7. I think that’s their watershed moment coupled with Trump’s election,” he said, referring to the fallout on U.S. campuses from Hamas’ 2023 attack on Israel and the war in Gaza, from protests to federal investigations.
Not every college educator sees 9/11 from the the same personal lens. Asked about the date coming up in his sociology classes that he’s taught at UCLA since 2020, Jason Sexton said, “Of course it was a political moment and part of American history, but now it doesn’t really come up at all.”
That gap between subject matter and classroom time extends beyond a single campus. Brian Campos, 19, a Los Angeles Trade-Technical College student, does not recall 9/11 being deeply taught at his high school in Huntington Park or in college. “We do acknowledge that it’s a tragic event. We don’t fully go into it. Since we weren’t really taught about it, we don’t have a lot of context on it,” he said.
He wants to know more about first responders. “How was their perspective? How did they help?”
But Jane Callaway, a 20-year-old student at West Los Angeles College, said she started to learn about 9/11 as early as elementary school — she grew up in the Barstow area — and on the anniversary remembers “all the innocent people who died.”
She also lamented that some people today still treat Muslims differently because of the attack. “There’s lots of racism based around 9/11. … That’s really wrong.”
How young is too young to tell children about 9/11?
For the youngest students, the question is how much to say.
Dr. David Schonfeld, director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, said there is no single right age to bring up the date. “If you pretend that nothing is bad about 9/11, I think children, even from a pretty young age, will understand that that’s probably not authentic,” he said.
Schonfeld said adults should explain that “this wasn’t done by a country. It was done by a group of people who came from one country or a particular background.” He also said to emphasize there are “many other people in that country, or of the same religious or cultural background, who were not involved.”
Melissa Brymer, director of terrorism and disaster programs at the UCLA-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, said one way to teach young children is to frame it as a day of remembrance, to acknowledge “that something big happened in the United States where lives were lost.”
Stacey Zavala, a Los Angeles elementary school teacher, was in her classroom teaching on Sept. 11, 2001.
She heard about the attacks on the radio, then turned on the TV to see the carnage. Now, she deliberately keeps her students’ focus narrow.
“I’ve always chosen to focus on the first responders and their heroism,” she said. “There is a fine line between knowing history and planting seeds of fear in young students.”
Times staff writers Andrew Khouri and Kate Sequeira contributed to this report.
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