Page teacher has colleagues, students not alive for 9/11. He can't forget it.

Twenty-five years after the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, educators are tasked with teaching that day to students who live in a world shaped by 9/11, but see it not as a memory but only as history.

Two weeks before, 19 Page High School upperclassmen students sat in tightly packed rows of chairs in the center of head baseball coach Kenneth Roeten’s leadership class, facing a large video monitor. The overhead lights were off, with reflected midday sunlight coming in from a horizontal window in the second-story classroom.

Roeten had students close their eyes and think about what they did that morning before coming to school. They ate breakfast, showered, got dressed, the students responded. 

“I want you to think about that, because the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, it was just like the day that you described, minus probably checking a cell phone and that kind of stuff,” Roeten told the class. 

“They went to work. They went to school. Some were early. Some were late, which ironically are decisions that are pretty significant on the morning of 9/11.”

Students were tasked with asking their parents about their experiences on that day. Many recounted that they were working or on their way to work in Middle Tennessee.

“9/11 was such a major, impactful thing in my life, and all the people that I know, and when I began teaching, the students did remember it,” Roeten told the Williamson Scene.

Now, 25 years later, some of his colleagues are young enough to have not even been alive in 2001. He can’t forget it. 

Days after the attack, Routen turned 21 years old. The then Louisiana Tech University student had joined the Army National Guard two years earlier and eventually deployed to Iraq, where he was shot by an enemy sniper in 2005 in a war that preceded the invasion of Afghanistan as part of the Global War on Terror sparked by 9/11. He medically retired in 2007 as a sergeant, carrying with him physical and mental wounds.

Routen has taught at PHS for 12 years, each year leading hands-on lessons about that historic day and the impact on the country and world, from creating collages to building a replica of the World Trade Center Twin Towers, and showing students the endless TV news reports from that time. 

"If I don't teach it, who's going to teach it?” Roeten said. “I just kind of said I'm gonna do this, and it's evolved. It's always looked somewhat like this, and the activities have always changed.”

This year, students work to handwrite the name of nearly 3,000 victims of attacks and arrange them in a display in the shape of the towers along with a display of American Flags.

"I want our students to actually handwrite the names. I want to see their different handwriting. I want a student whom I don't even know to sit there and go, 'Okay, I'm going to write down Anthony Rodriguez’— like I'm actually writing a person's name down.”

At five tables, students huddled together around printed-out ledgers bearing the names of victims, some students highlighting the names of fallen first responders in pink, others combing through yellowing pages of newspapers published in the days after the attack bearing bold headlines: “Days of mourning,” “Act of war,” “Troops mobilize.”

One student pointed out a newspaper headline: “U.S. Muslims hoped they aren’t blamed”

“That’s interesting,” she said before marveling at a full-page ad for a 2001 Toyota Camry for a whopping $19K. She turned the page to a two-page full-color centerfold spread of photos of the destruction, whispering “wow.”

Routen’s lesson extends beyond the classroom, leading some students and PHS community members — largely student athletes — in a memorial stair climb up and down the football stadium’s bleachers around dawn on each anniversary of 9/11. 

The tradition memorializes the 110 stories that each World Trade Center Tower had, steps scaled by first responders. The event has become so popular with students that they host it twice, on Sept. 10 and Sept. 11.

“Today you’re here to honor that memory but also to learn — to learn of the courage and sacrifice that average Americans partook [in] on that morning,” Routen told the group of 202 students huddled on the bleachers around 6 a.m. on Friday. He encouraged them to not only remember the tragedy but the support that Americans gave each other in the days, weeks and months after the attack.

Around 261 students took part over those two days — the sound of feet shuffling up and down the bouncing aluminum bleacher seats cutting through the dark stadium. 

They ascended and descended the bleachers and an endless stream of red, white and blue Page patriot T-shirts. At times, their pace slowed to a walk with students encouraging each other to work through the tiring march, sweat forming on their brows and in their hair as the morning light began to break through the pink clouds behind Paige High School. 

“I see it [9/11] through different eyes every year, because of just growing older,” Routen, a father of a 10- and 9-year-old, told the Williamson Scene.

“Every time I watch that [9/11 footage,] it brings back everything. It's a little bit duller every year, but I think now in my life I'm beginning to look more into like, why did we do this? Why did we do that? So on and so forth. I think that just happens with wisdom and more knowledge. As an educator, we can talk data and test scores and all that kind of stuff till we're blue in the face, and I feel like it's my responsibility to share that [history and experience] and hopefully that doesn't get beaten out of me, hopefully that stays the same for as long as I'm here.”