In Days After 9/11, A Dizzying Whirl of Thoughts From L.M. High Students

Recently, Mary Brown, a former teacher, was asked what the teachers and administrators were thinking about on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, after a picture-perfect blue-sky day turned into a national nightmare.

“Protection and care for the students, who were obviously confused and shaken, upset, crying—all sorts of things,” Brown replied, without a second’s hesitation. “So we obviously suspended lesson plans, all of us, and we just made sure that we stayed close to students to make sure that we could help them in whatever way was useful.”

One of those ways was to create an 18-foot panel in the hallway—just a large piece of paper, on which students, teachers and staff were invited to write, or draw, their thoughts and feelings. Brown adopted the idea from a similar panel she saw at Bryn Mawr College that week, where she was in graduate school at the time.

And while the difference in literary and artistic expression between college-age and graduate students and those in high school can span a pretty wide gulf, Lower Merion kids were allowed to spell out anything that was on their minds.

And that meant anything.

‘To have gone over it with a White-Out pen or to patch things over would’ve been, to me, hypocrisy.’

This “no censorship” decision was not as gutsy a call as it might now appear, Brown said. “I felt very strongly about that. I spoke with the principal and said that the purpose of those panels was to help students, and we can’t be censoring because we wouldn’t see what they would need. And so we agreed and said let’s just let students—and faculty, and staff—put whatever they needed to write.

“To have gone over it with a White-Out pen or to patch things over would’ve been, to me, hypocrisy, because we stand for free speech in this country, and liberty for the world. To suppress anything on that critical day and the days after, to me, would be ... yes, hypocrisy.”

Brown, who now teaches at , said the decision did not take much convincing, since the idea was to trust students to filter what they thought in the way they expressed themselves. “And I think they did,” she said.

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The first panel exhibits a “much more visceral reaction,” Brown said. The second shows a little bit more reflection on the attacks and the people affected, and the third one “definitely shows more” contemplation, she added. (All panels can be .)

There was no instruction to students, either, on what to do with the panels, only a few words, Sharpied large by Brown, as a sort of prompt: “9/11.” Terms like “Thoughts,” “Feelings,” “Concerns,” “Worries,” etc. There was no note that the panels would be monitored or edited—no directive at all. The students deduced eventually that the banners were truly free speech, but vitriol and foul language is minimal.

“Students didn’t perceive anything to be offensive,” Brown said, “nor did the teachers.”

The first panel went up two days after the attacks, on Sept. 13. All of them stayed up “for weeks,” Brown recalled. A candlelight vigil was held that Friday evening, Sept. 14, at Arnold Field, an open forum for those who wished to speak.

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Six months later, after Afghanistan was invaded and talk of war was hitting a national high pitch, Brown said a Lower Merion counselor named Frank Hartwell thought it would be instructional, perhaps therapeutic, to put the panels back up again for a short time—a week or so. During that time, they were not touched.

“They were blessed,” Brown said. “There was no defacing of them, no harm done to those panels. The Lower Merion students are very accepting ... kids are not as critical as other segments of the population.”

To wit, a quote said to be from Cicero, scrawled on the large first panel: “Magna eminest vis humanitatis,” perhaps put there by one of Brown’s Latin students. “For the strength of humanity is great.”           

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For more on what is written and expressed, , which taken together as a whole make up the entirety of the three panels.