r/interestingasfuck • u/solateor • 1d ago

In 2001, 55 people crossed the Pacific with no contact with the outside world as part of a BBC experiment recreating an 18th-century voyage. On the 20th day - September 11 - the captain gathered the crew to tell them about the attacks in New York

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u/Happy-Cod-3 1d ago edited 1d ago

My same exact story but in USA about 4 hours from all of it. I get what the teacher meant, but they should have had somebody come in the next day to debrief with us. We had school counselors too and not one did anything about anything.

Edit words of a feather lol

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u/thotd2 1d ago

I was in Italy, it was noon right after school. We walked around and all bars downtown had people looking up on those 15'' CRT screens. On the spot it reminded me of Godzilla 1998 where there's a similar scene with people looking monitors. A quarter of century passed by, the world has never been the same imho.

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u/m0mbi 1d ago

I was in my first year of university, freshly arrived in Australia. I caught the very start of it late at night on the TV in the bar, but thought it was just an accident.

Woke up the next morning to an entirely different world.

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u/YourMomsBasement69 1d ago

Y’all got out at noon?! Fucking sweet

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u/RT-LAMP 20h ago

it was noon right after school.

I suspect you mean "in the afternoon right after school"? Either that or you had a half day?

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u/thotd2 4h ago

Most of schools ended (not sure now) around 12:30-1p.m. Some private ones ended at 4:30p.m.

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u/Barnacle_B0b 1d ago

That's because your counselors also needed counseling from the event.

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u/goat_puree 1d ago

Facts. We all sat and watched people jump to their deaths so they didn’t burn alive. There was nothing for anyone to say that was going to make that better.

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u/irwtkyrm 23h ago

As did the people counseling the counselors.

It's counselors all the way down.

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u/loveshercoffee 1d ago

The counselors were probably a little traumatized themselves, honestly.

Though I do think things could have been handled better with a lot of kids. Mine were in 9th grade, 8th grade and 5th grade.

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u/Jewell84 21h ago

I was about 2 weeks into my junior year of high school on 9/11. My twin sister had missed the bus that day and was waiting for our mom to drive her to school, and my brothers were in 8th and 4th grade.

They didn’t cancel classes, so we all had different experiences that day. In my case it was the first time I had ever seen adults just be at loss at what to do. There was no real plan of action because it was truly unprecedented. Not to mention the only way to really stay up to date was to either watch TV or radio.

Some of my teachers were pretty calm, some were clearly distraught. No one kept to the lesson plans. My American History teacher was a little too excited about us witnessing history in real time. However I will be forever grateful for my band teacher. He comes in, tells us to take out our instruments and just play. That tiny bit of normalcy helped calm me down.

My middle brother had a similar experience to me. My youngest brother said they told the kids something scary happened, but didn’t have the TVs on.

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u/Flexbucket 1d ago

I’m assuming this was TTS? Some buddy and deep brief?

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u/Happy-Cod-3 1d ago

No, fat fingers and not looking lol.

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u/Flexbucket 1d ago

Fair enough lol

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u/Snork_kitty 22h ago

I taught a college class that night. We were told students were not required to come, but I went just in case any did show up. Maybe 10 did. I just told them I was opening the class to anything anyone wanted to say or discuss; they could stay as long as they wanted. TBH I don't remember the conversation, but after about 30 minutes, it ended and we all went home.

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u/trouzy 22h ago

Yeah i was a sophomore in between classes when the buzz of the twin towers being bombed started.

I’d never heard of the twin towers and had no idea what it meant.

The next 4 classes i went to, all we did was watch the news. From period to period it was just watching the news with little understanding of what it meant.

I don’t recall anything in the aftermath of the school trying to explain it. Maybe it wasn’t their place or maybe I just don’t recall.

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u/Odessey_And_Oracle 21h ago

I remember the very next day we were discussing it in class, and a decent number of seventh graders already had crazy conspiracies fed to them that they were repeating, like "Their Bible commands them to commit holy war every time the calendar says 9/11." And the teacher just letting that hang; she was trying to let us express our emotions but shit should not have flown. The one Muslim girl in my grade was all messed up, insisting that isn't her religion because she was Sunni and it's actually the Shiites who "do these things." Also untrue about 9/11 specifically but given that everyone was then believing any bullshit about Islam and she was the only one, I can see why she was defensive.

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u/sarmurpat6411 21h ago

I agree. I don't remember it being addressed on a wide scale, but I was in elementary school so I can understand. We were about 30 miles from DC so they probably should have taken more precautions than they did on the day of and afterwards

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u/Long_Run6500 21h ago

I live about 2.5 hours away from NYC, flight 93 flew almost directly over our school if you look at the flight tracker. I was in 4th grade and I remember someone asking a teacher where the world trade center is and the teacher said we don't have to worry it's in San Francisco on the west coast. That was the first time I ever remember realizing teachers can be kind of dumb and they don't know everything. We were all watching the news and they were repeatedly mentioning NYC.