The past week

In about thirty minutes, I am about to give my last final exam for the Spring semester. This is my 10 o'clock T-Th World Geography class. Our last day of class before today's final was Tuesday. As in: the day before the tornadoes. I was sitting here realizing that it hasn't even been a whole week since I last saw these kids, but so much has changed. The devastation across Alabama (and other states too) has just affected us all so much. It's heartrending. And then the news about Osama bin Laden last night. Tray and I had gone to bed early without checking the news, so we didn't find out about it until this morning. I was just reading an article in the Washington Post about the celebrations last night at the White House and at the 9/11 memorial. The author was understandably appalled that people were celebrating a man's death in that manner, but he went out to investigate and talked to the crowd who were mostly young (children at the time of 9/11) and they weren't celebrating his death so much as the closure to what is for them a lifetime of stress and worry and war. I'm not sure they were right to feel any closure from this, but I can at least understand wanting to celebrate that.

And it does remind me to put myself in my student's shoes again. World Geography is a freshman level class. The average freshman is 18 year old. They were 8 when 9/11 happened. The majority of their lives up until now have been framed by that day and the things that came after it. I was born in 1978 during the Cold War, and most of my readers here were born much before that. Still, I remember worrying about nuclear war, and where the bomb shelters were. I remember when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved. Most of my students now weren't even born then. Their whole worldview is completely different.

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about everything right now, but I can at least sort of see how they might be feeling. It's just -- it hasn't even been a week since I saw them last.