A piece of the World Trade Center’s North Tower will rest at the front of Betty Collins’ history class Friday. It’s how she starts the conversation with her eighth grade students.
She’ll tell them about the morning three days after her 16th birthday, when the biggest thing on her mind was a Matchbox Twenty concert. Her parents bought two tickets to her favorite band’s Oklahoma City tour date on Sept. 12, 2001. The show never took place.
She’ll tell them about the surprise assembly at Bishop Kelley High School and being asked to pray. And she’ll tell them about watching the live coverage for the rest of the day, as the towers collapsed 25 years ago and everything changed.
“These kids don’t know an America that hasn’t been at war,” said Collins, who chairs the history department at Union’s Eighth Grade Center in Broken Arrow. “I never knew an America at war until I was 16.”
Collins helped the Freedom Flag Foundation pass legislation to fly an annual 9/11 Remembrance “Freedom Flag” on Oklahoma state property in 2022. The steel artifact she displays year-round is from the 92nd through 95th floors of the North Tower — one of 50 on loan from the foundation as an educational tool.
To her, the story of Sept. 11 and all that came after shows the duality of America.
“I think the meaning of 9/11 has expanded greatly throughout the 25 years, and I know every generation has that ‘you remember when’ moment,” she said. “Obviously that’s 9/11 for my generation.”
In her first year of teaching, Collins’ students had childhood memories of the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history. Now students can’t fathom a country without added airport security. More than half her students are immigrants, and many of their families moved to the country after 2001.
“It’s just interesting to teach this age group and to try to just impress on them how it changed the feeling of security in the country,” Collins said. “How it was the first time I remember as a teenager, young adult, like ever really feeling unsafe.”
Crafting age-appropriate and meaningful lessons about Sept. 11 is an annual focus for Heather Goodenough, an instructional coach at Broken Arrow Public Schools and president of the Oklahoma Council for the Social Studies. In 2001, she worked at Union’s Roy Clark Elementary.
“Teachers are always nervous to broach difficult conversations and so we have to talk through how to have those difficult conversations in the classroom,” Goodenough said. “And they’re important to have.”
At Broken Arrow, she said, that comes through clear expectations for respectful discussions set at the beginning of the year. Goodenough recently met with a first-year teacher about how to preserve the safety of a Muslim student in his classroom. For his seventh grade class, they decided, the lesson doesn’t need to take a religious turn to be meaningful.
“Its also important to acknowledge not every German was a Nazi,” Goodenough said. “And so it’s important that we don’t stereotype and do an all-or-nothing.”
Sixth graders may spend the day focusing on the names of the 2,977 lives lost in a lesson focused on empathy, Goodenough said, whereas seniors may analyze a survivor’s interview or footage of the tragedy.
The topic extends beyond the anniversary. Oklahoma’s U.S. history standards require students learn to summarize the Sept. 11 attacks, “including examples of heroism and efforts to combat terrorism,” like the anti-terrorism Patriot Act.
Collins connects the 2001 law to the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, allowing students to explore the parallel fear of immigrants behind both pieces of legislation.
“Something new we’ve been talking about recently is ongoing government monitoring, like Flock cameras for example,” Collins said. “How once you’ve given up that liberty, then it’s really difficult to claw that back.”
Social studies can be a neglected subject, Goodenough said. That only makes her more passionate about teaching it well and with nuance.
“I think it’s so imperative that we do teach the good, the bad and the ugly,” she said. “And that it’s okay to teach these difficult topics because we need it as a society.”
Collins said she’s still very pro-America, but also a realist who’s learned to understand being patriotic and loving your country doesn’t always necessarily look the same to everybody.
Her lessons with students engage in several difficult aspects of the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks. America is like a house, Collins said. U.S. citizens aren’t responsible for the condition they receive it, but are for the condition they leave it in.
“And I think that’s another lesson that I tell these kids — I am the government, question me,” Collins said. “Never stop questioning anybody, doesn’t matter who it is. Question the government, question authority respectfully, but don’t just take any one source for anything.”
News decisions at the Tulsa Flyer are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
