Don’t forget the mandatory 5 minutes fiddling with the thing before the one kid with half a brain figures out how to switch inputs.
I know we’re shit posting but if I could get real for a moment, this is how I learned about 9/11.
TV rolls in. Whole class goes “Yay”. Teacher says, “Be quiet and watch”. Whole class goes, “Oh no, he’s grumpy”. Whole class goes, “Wait… This is live TV”. A whole world changes.
Otherwise though, TV good.
This is how I found out too. I remember 9th grade had just begun and it was the first class of the morning. Replays of the planes hitting the towers were playing over and over when we walked into the classroom. I was living in Alaska at the time so it felt like a world away. It was all very surreal.
I arrived in Hong Kong from the US on 9/11 (so 9/10 in the US). Turned on BBC in the evening… and didn’t sleep for a few nights. Extremely weird way to start a year teaching in China.
I was in the U.S., but I was in my office and there were no TV at the office. My dad called and told me a plane had hit one of the WTC towers and I thought that was terrible, but I assumed he meant like a Cessna or something and didn’t think that much more about it until he called and told me a plane had hit the second tower. It was my business and I only had one employee, so I closed for the day, told him to go home, and went over to my parents’ house to watch the news with them while keeping my wife, who had to work, informed via text.
On 09/11, my middle school hid the news from the students. I heard information about what was going on through gossip from other students. It was incredibly surreal because students were getting pulled out of class left and right by their parents. Walking by the teachers lounge, I peaked in to see the teachers staring at the TV and crying, but the principal was steadfast about not telling the students.
I honestly had no idea what was really going on and it wasn’t until I got home from school by the bus where I was surprised to see my Dad already home from work just glued to the TV. That’s when I finally learned about what really happened and saw the footage for the first time…at 4pm in the afternoon…
I was also in middle school, one of the history teachers for my grade put it on the TV before the principal decided to try to not let the middle and elementary schoolers (it was a K-12 school) watch, so we all kind of knew what was going on, and in hindsight my teachers seem to have disagreed with the choice to keep us out of the loop. After lunch several of us were in the classroom before the teacher so we turned on her radio and listened to the news, that’s how I first learned about the second plane.
My elementary school didn’t hide the Challenger shuttle disaster with us, but for some reason they wouldn’t let us watch it happen live. Which, I guess, saved us from being as traumatized as we could have been. I remember the teacher coming into the lunch room and telling us and the big gasp. That mission was a big deal to kids because a school teacher would be on board, the first civilian astronaut.
Fuck yeah!
If it was educational and bad = take notes from the first 5-10 minutes and sleep for the rest
If it was educational and good = BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL
If it was a movie = sleep
Remember how staticy CRTs were? Or the loud hum as it booted up?
Or even the picture growing and warming up or shrinking down to the middle when you turned it off.
Also putting a magnet up against the glass!
