Coping Since Sept. 11
NPR Listeners Reflect on Life After National Tragedy

Paper bats fly around my third grade classroom as the eight- and nine-year-olds I teach gear up for Halloween. It's a familiar holiday, but this year the children's stories are a little more violent, their drawings showcase planes and falling buildings and their heroes are firefighters saving lives. Many of these students have seen first-hand the destruction at the Pentagon, as they pass it on their way to school.

"In the days after the attacks, when fire and rescue vehicles zoomed down the street, sirens blaring, the children stopped dead in their tracks. Sirens terrify them." Leslie Fravel, 3rd grade teacher

Since Sept. 11th they have asked me those unanswerable questions that always begin with "why." They are unsettled in ways that I have not seen in my 20-something years of teaching. In the days after the attacks, when fire and rescue vehicles zoomed down the street, sirens blaring, the children stopped dead in their tracks. Sirens terrify them. To these young boys and girls, sirens mean a terrorist assault.

All has changed -- changed utterly. Yet these children and I return to the routines of the day to quiet the stirrings of trouble.

Today in room 206 the children are practicing multiplication tables. One group works with manipulatives, another checks their work with small, plastic calculators. In the midst of this math lesson, a fire truck screams past our windows. But not one head turns. No one even stops to look. The radio plays on in the background -- classical music, book reviews, interviews, the weather and the news. Multiplication tables and NPR: working together to calm the fears of anxious children and their teacher; helping us to build a sense of a new routine.

Leslie Fravel
Oakton, Va.

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