It’s been 25 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks irrevocably changed America. Now, a teacher in Spokane is working to connect with students who don’t remember that day.
It’s no surprise that Karrie Docterman-King was at Rogers High School the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. She’s been teaching history and current events there for 32 years. Before that, she was a Rogers graduate herself.
Docterman-King, whose students call her “Ms. Docterman,” was set to teach a leadership class on the morning of 9/11. Before she got to school, she turned on her TV to watch the news.
“I was hearing [former Spokane news anchor] Shelly Monahan actually say that there was a plane that went into the first Trade Center,” Docterman-King said. “And no one knew what that meant.”
Eventually, she had to leave for work. She watched on her classroom TV as a second plane hit the second tower.
A retired Air Force colonel taught down the hall from her. When the third plane hit the Pentagon, Docterman-King recalls going to him and asking what was happening. He told her, “Karrie, we’re at war.”
She could barely process it.
“I was a young mom,” she said. “I had a daughter who wasn’t even a year old. And all I could think of is, I just wanted to go home and grab her.”
Docterman-King knew her responsibilities as a teacher. She had a room full of scared teenagers who were depending on her.
“A lot of kids didn’t necessarily come that day,” she said. “But the ones that had nowhere else to go, or no one at home, or hadn’t heard about it were here.”
She called her husband to pick up her daughter, then focused on her students.
She doesn’t remember exactly what she did in class that day. She knows she turned the TV off and let her students process. She thinks they might have played games.
Whatever the specifics, her actions had an impact.
“I've had students, after I post something online, and they'll say, ‘Oh, thank you for what you did that day,’” Docterman-King said. “‘You made me feel safe.’”
For years after 9/11, Docterman-King didn’t teach the attacks as history, but as current events. She prioritized remembrance and asking students about their lived experience of the day.
But as she kept teaching, students’ birth years crept later and later — 1999, 2000, 2001. Eventually, she was teaching 9/11 to kids who had no memory of it.
“If you were five years old [in 2001], you might have had a response to remembering how your family maybe responded to [9/11],” she said. “The news being on, or there was sadness, or it felt chaotic.”
But 25 years later?
“These students have no clue,” she said.
Now, when she tells students about the attacks, she tries not to dwell on the specifics. She knows they can go on YouTube and watch videos of the planes crashing into buildings.
“It’s more about: How did we respond?” she said.
She emphasizes how America came together after 9/11. She wants her students to understand that sometimes, something terrible can unite people.
This year, she’ll ask them for recent examples of unity, like she always does. She wonders if someone might bring up the Spokane Complex Wildfires.
Docterman-King doesn’t shy away from how 9/11 divided the country, either. She tells students how people scapegoated American Muslims after 9/11, and touches on increased government surveillance.
Often, those two things were related. In 2013, plaintiffs filed a class-action lawsuit against the New York Police Department for its surveillance of primarily Muslim neighborhoods.
“So the question is, how much civil liberties are we willing to give up for something we would call national security?” Docterman-King said.
She said that her 9/11 lessons often get through to students born after 2001. Many are shocked by how much one event changed America.
But even Docterman-King is unable to convey the raw emotions of that day.
“Every year after 9/11, I go home and I’m exhausted,” she said.
This story was edited with support from the Northwest News Network, a partnership of public media stations in the Pacific Northwest.
