CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — It’s been 22 years since 9/11 and many people in the Coastal Bend will never forget what it was like.
But for many current students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade, they weren't even born yet and 9/11 is just part of American history.
Eric DeWolfe, a high school history teacher for the Ingleside Independent School District, said 9/11 changed his life forever.
“Walked down the hall, went down the next hall and the librarian that was working at the time came running past me and I said “what’s going on,” and she said a plane just hit a building,” DeWolfe said. “I said ‘yeah, I know I just say that, and she said, ‘no, the second one hit.”
He said that no one in America should ever forget this day, including his young students.
DeWolfe said that it is his goal to make sure every student knows the importance of that day.
“So, like today, in some of the classes, I was explaining, you got up, you had breakfast, you got ready to come to school, you going to come to school. None of you thought today is going to be the last day on earth,” he said. “None of the people that got on the plan thought that, but it’s a reality that happened so you have to understand what we went through as an America at the time.”
In his class, he shared photos and important details about the day American history changed forever.
Several students in the class said that they never knew how serious the terror attack was.
Ingleside High School sophomore Maddox Middagh said that the 9/11 lesson has really opened his eyes.
“It’s just really important and I never had a presentation that in-depth before and I thought there were only two planes, so it’s definitely really descriptive,” Middagh said.
DeWolfe wants his student to know the importance of Sept. 11, but more importantly he said he wants his student to know compassion.
“The horrendous things they see in the PowerPoint presentation, they will sit there and say, ‘that happened, I am not going to let that happen on my watch,’ and so it’s like I am trying to give them history, but I am trying to make them each understand something horrible happened and we need to come together and care for each other so that it never happens again,” DeWolfe said.
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