The time is 8:46 a.m. The date is September 11.

14 years ago today, a commercial airplane hijacked by al-Qaeda members crashed into the North tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. 15 minutes later, a second plane smashed through the South tower. The buildings caught on fire, blazing for almost two hours before the structures collapsed on themselves, killing those who hadn’t already died in the flames or by jumping out of windows, preferring to end their own lives rather than stand powerless in anticipation of their own demise. The first wave of rescue workers faced a similar fate. In total, there were 2,996 casualties, not to mention the exponentially greater amount of friends and relatives left behind in their wake.

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The time is 8:46 a.m. The date is September 11.

14 years later, Solon students lounge in their desks as teachers lecture about parabolas and ionic bonds, staring at the clock in mind-numbing boredom. When the clock reaches 9:37 a.m., their only emotion is relief that they’re about to be released from second period; never once does it cross their thoughts that this is the same time that the terrorist planes shattered the Pentagon in 2001. If a teacher does happen to mention this grievous anniversary, rest assured that it will have its backbone firmly secured in education. After all, what’s the point in discussing the emotional impact of the arguably worst terrorist attack in human history if it doesn’t allow GPA-hungry students the opportunity to better their grades?

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According to a 2011 survey conducted by Columbia University, among almost 30,000 recovery workers, lower Manhattan residents and passerby that witnessed the 9/11 attacks, an entire fifth of them suffer from either Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or depression; of these individuals, half screened positive for both conditions.

Traumatic events such as 9/11 or the Holocaust are being turned into lesson plans by teachers who are privileged to be far enough removed from them that they find it completely acceptable to turn mass graves into insignificant grades.

The crude, burning emotions permeating through personal works such as Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” a memoir about the Holocaust, or Leonard Pitts Jr.’s article “Sept. 12, 2001: We’ll go forward from this moment,” written in the aftermath of 9/11, have become fodder for fact-recall multiple choice, quote identification and rhetorical analysis. Somehow, it’s hard to believe that Wiesel admitted that he felt relief at his father’s death in order to become the subject of a multiple choice question about a metaphor.

What teachers fail to realize is that the similes, the metaphors, the tones, the anaphoras and whatever new dissection tools the College Board fabricates were not utilized by these authors on purpose. When pouring one’s soul out onto paper, making the conscious choice to add a synecdoche is the last thing on one’s mind.

They write because they have something to say. They write because it’s physically painful for them to keep these emotions bottled up inside of them. They write because they want to make the world a better place in a way that it wasn’t for them.

Unlike SHS students, the literary devices that these authors employ are simply a byproduct of their writing rather than an attempt to rack up a few more brownie points from teachers.

These works are not the fluff pieces slapped onto standardized tests for rhetorical analysis.

They’re real. They’re raw. They’re painful.

Some might say these events are even too painful to be discussed in-depth in school, that emotions such as these belong outside of the classroom. Yet isn’t institutionally facilitating this desensitization just bringing us one step closer to forgetting those lives that were lost? How much can one push aside for the sake of rigorous studying before one loses sight of his or her own morals?

We need to open up our eyes and realize that events like these did not happen for the sake of privileged middle-class suburban kids to analyze them in English class. If we continue to set this precedent, it’s inevitable that one day we too will be reduced to the mere formats of our stories.

I am writing in response to the column about “emotional apathy and Sept. 11.”

As a teacher of some of the literature and content mentioned in the article, I am intrigued by the writer’s reflections.

The author referred to teachers, to me, as “privileged” for being “removed” from the tragedy that inspires writing. First, I would caution the author against making such overarching statements because it’s not possible to know the personal suffering of everyone who works here. Speaking for myself—I don’t know that I wake up and feel privileged because I have not suffered. The correct word is not privileged. But I do feel fortunate. That good fortune does not afford me the right not to examine the suffering of others. In fact, it compels me to do the opposite: to learn from the events in the world and to learn from those most deeply connected to those events.

Next, the writer for the Courier and I would disagree that standardized test makers “slap” “fluff pieces” together to make an examination. I wouldn’t describe the words of Annie Dillard, Virginia Woolf, and Martin Luther King, Jr. as fluff.

I do believe there is a point about which the author of the column and I would agree: writers write about tragic events to relieve their suffering or to expose the ills of the world. They might not expect, or maybe even desire, their writings to be studied for the intricate elements of language. I can agree that writers like Elie Wiesel didn’t hope for students to study his use of metaphor, but instead had far deeper aspirations. But Elie Wiesel’s Night changed the world. He didn’t only change the world because he survived the Holocaust; he changed the world because he chose to document his survival in writing. Many survivors wrote of their experiences. As teachers, we choose to examine what makes his writing so powerful, more powerful than others, and to do so involves a study of his language.

When English teachers assign students to study specific language devices (which are not “fabricate[d]” by the College Board, as stated in the piece)—our aim is to inspire students to think about how writing is constructed, so it frames how they receive the message. I think Frank Bruni, columnist for The New York Times, put it best when he describes his experiences in a literature class in college. He discusses how his professor opened up his eyes to a new appreciation of words: “…she taught us how much weight a few syllables can carry, how powerful the muscle of language can be…She demonstrated the rewards of close attention. It informed all my reading from then on. It colored the way I listened to people and even watched TV. It transformed me.”