Student art scanned & inverted - Cypress Hills Brooklyn - Felicia Cuebas
On September 11, 2001, I was teaching my first eighth grade class in Cypress Hills on the Brooklyn & Queens border. Our classroom was on the fourth floor with a view of the Towers peeking over Forest Park. At about 9AM, as I was introducing a thematic unit about the Harlem Renaissance, when I glanced toward the City and saw what I thought was a fire in Brooklyn that was burning in front of the Towers. My students asked what was wrong and I gave them my theory and they said that it looked like the Towers were burning. I told them to get out their notebooks and turn to a fresh page. I told them I was turning on 1010WINS news radio and they were to record all the times as they announced them in the margins and then record what was being reported. I also said they may want to save these notebooks to look at them one day to remember.
After a while, they asked me what was going on and I wrote down on the board the names Osama bin-Laden and the Taliban. I had recently watched a Frontline about Afghanistan and took an educated guess. The next day we were off but on the following day they came back to school stunned. By Friday, I had them draw what they were feeling and they wrote poems, which I typed on their images. A fire-fighter who was a first responder and a former student came to the school directly from working several days without sleep. He found his way to our classroom and sobbed in my arms outside the classroom. He came in and told us of his accounts of what he had seen and what he had been doing for the past 96 hours.
When I finally got home on September 11, there were documents with singed edges that had blown into my backyard in Flatbush. Other documents from Morgan Stanley and Post-it notes were also scattered about the Brooklyn College campus. I saved them all in a Ziplock bag. The fire-fighter had come the following week to our classroom again with pictures and artifacts he had collected. I still have a glass vial of dust and ashes he had given me.
