I am in my 21st year of teaching at my university. I have taught (here or on loan to a consortium study abroad program) for 20 of those years. In 2001-2002 I had a sabbatical and in addition to planned research I set out to supplement my cultural understanding of a couple of the areas I teach by travel and taking a class. The class was Arabic, and I took the first semester it in the fall of 2001. We had the class four days a week, one hour on Mondays and Wednesdays, and one and a half on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So we were in class while the World Trade Center burned. This is my story.
The class was perhaps 15 or maximum of 20 students. These included an anthro grad student who wanted to do fieldwork in Djibouti, several undergrads, many of whom had parents who were Middle Eastern in origin (including one whose parents ran a good restaurant with your standard hummus/felafel/lamb/lentil soup menu), and a few other random students I didn't get to know very well. I had asked to audit the class, but was asked by the instructor to take it for credit, which I was happy to do. There was one student who was perhaps my age, perhaps a bit older, who was auditing, with her permission. (That annoyed me, at first, that I had to pay and he didn't. But I got over it.)
I was staying with my parents and that morning when I got up, took my shower and drank my coffee, my Mom told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We discussed the small plane that had hit the Empire State Building sometime in the past, and how it just kind of shrugged it off. I don't remember when I heard that there was a second one but by the time I had driven to campus and parked, I was hearing Bob Edwards talking to the reporter who was in the Pentagon and knowing that they were evacuating the Pentagon. I had to leave the car, however, to walk the seven or eight minute trek to the classroom, and by the time I got there, people knew the Pentagon had been hit. The auditor was the one who was most freaked out by this. We all didn't know what to think, but he did (of course). It was the anniversary of the 1973 coup in Chile that the US had been responsible for, and he muttered something about that. And talked about leaving the country, or making a run for it, or something, and then sprinted from the classroom, not to be seen again for a couple of weeks.
At this point our professor showed up, a small Tunisian woman with a fierce manner. She looked at us, in our confused state, and said something like "All right, it is time to focus on Arabic." And we did. We went through the assignment for the day, taking a break after 45 minutes, and the anthro grad student and I went into an office across the hall, and asked what was going on. The secretary told us that the towers had fallen. And we spent the 10 minutes of the break trying to figure out whether they would have hit the river when they fell over -- how close were they to the river? We came back when the professor did, and we went on through the rest of the class. When I left, I was planning on stopping in the gym on the way home, but I went directly home, went to my mother's bedroom and lay down on the bed with her to watch tv. That was the first time I saw the images, the first time I realized the overwhelming nature of the event. Even hearing it on the radio had not been enough. And the teacher, by not letting us discuss it in class, had held on to a sense of normalcy, and helped us do the same. It was an impressive display of calm.
The next day I went back to class. The teacher walked in to the classroom where we were sitting in our chairs in our circle, sat down in her customary seat, and told us "This is difficult for me, and I am sure it is for you. If I suddenly get up and walk out of the room, just continue on without me." And we went through the hour class without a break, concentrating on the language without a break.
I was receiving email from my home university, and got the administration's directions for how to deal with students who wanted to talk about events. I also got copies of the student paper where I was that semester, and read that university's advice for how to cope with things. In general, as a teacher you were being encouraged to let conversation develop within reason in your classroom. But nowhere were you given guidance what to do with a class so completely relevant and yet so dangerously uncontrollable. I had a bit of that a couple of years later when I was teaching a Middle Eastern Studies class when the Iraq War started. I had students who wanted to talk about that rather than the direct subject matter of the class. I didn't have control and we lost several days and the focus of the class. My Arabic professor, who had a much worse situation, a more volatile group of students, and a much more extreme emotional involvement, as she was an Arab woman, an immigrant to this country, had handled it beautifully, simply, and effectively. I am still, ten years later, impressed with her skill in this situation.
At the end of the semester, we were given a form to fill out with evaluation of her effectiveness as an instructor. I hated doing that when I was a student, and I hated it even more as a teacher myself, particularly when I had a dean who really wanted to get rid of me and would pull comments at random to show me how incompetent I was as a teacher. But when we were given these forms at the end of the semester, I took the time to write about this event and how my Arabic prof had handled it.
I only took Arabic that one semester. The second semester started out with five weeks of travel in Southeast Asia, and then I went back to the research project that had really been planned as the foundation of the sabbatical. I never got my final exam, never talked to the professor again. But I remember her and September 11th vividly. And I thank her for the grace with which she held us calm that day. That was a lesson in teaching I won't forget.