Lessons from a Crisis

Stuy ‘93, English Dept.

On 9/11, I was 25 years old, starting my second year as a full-time English teacher at Stuyvesant. I had returned to Stuy after graduating in 1993 as a member of the first senior class in the “new building” here on Chambers St. Here are some of the things I’d like current students to know about that time. 

--Fire drills are more useful than you think. You know that moment during a fire drill when the staircases get clogged, and someone makes a crack about how “if this were a real fire, we’d already be burned”? As I led my homeroom down the stairs to evacuate the building on 9/11, I understood for the first time how important that repeated structure is. We all knew where to go. 

--In a moment of great crisis, togetherness and calm are possible, even likely. Nobody was yelling. So many were asking each other, “Do you have a place to go, a way to get back home?” When we walked past St. Vincent’s Hospital, there was a line around the block of people wanting to give blood. 

--Everybody has an individual story to tell. The combination of those stories creates a fuller picture. As STC Faculty Advisor, I worked with a group of Stuyvesant students to create and perform that year’s Winter Drama, with their eyes. 10 student actors interviewed 27 members of the Stuy community—students, faculty, and staff—about their experiences on 9/11 and in the months afterward. They transcribed and edited the interviews into monologues, using each interviewee’s words, including line breaks to indicate pauses and speech patterns. Each actor performed as two or three actual people: a school custodian, a pregnant teacher, a Muslim student. Together, their stories provided a richer and more complex understanding of our community experience than any single story could have done. 

--It’s not always healthy to rush “back to normal” after a traumatic experience. Give yourself space to process, and follow the science. The DOE and NYC government okayed our return to Stuyvesant on October 9, less than a month after 9/11. The air was still thick with smoke from the wreckage of the towers. In the years since, we’ve learned more about the toxins in the air, and better practices for acknowledging and responding to trauma. Members of our community have experienced a range of health issues, from anxiety to cancer. One of the students who created with their eyes, the marvelous Cathy Choy, died of stomach cancer in 2019. She was 32. We will never know for sure whether it was something in the post-9/11 air that caused Cathy’s death. We do know that all of us were sent back into an environment that was more dangerous than we believed it to be at the time. 

--Collective memory is short; storytelling is vital as a means of remembering and making sense of traumatic experience. with their eyes was published as a book, allowing students at other schools around the country, and future generations of Stuyvesant students, access to our experience—you can find it in our library and in the English Dept. book room. Ask the adults in your lives about their memories of that day. And more—ask each other about your experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Write your own stories, for future generations.