An investment banker who was working in the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks, Mr. Glass, now a teacher, has finally figured out a way to discuss the event with his students. EIGHTEEN months or so before 9/11, I had begun taking graduate courses in education at night. After 25 years in the financial world, I was determined to become a social studies teacher before I turned 50. As a survivor of the attack on the World Trade Center who was about to enter the classroom as a teacher, I had many conflicting thoughts about the message I would share with my students. The need to put my thoughts on 9/11 into the form of a lesson kept tugging at me for more than a year. I tried many times, and just as many times I failed. For whatever reason, after a full year, the obstacles evaporated. I am now a teacher and am preparing a social studies lesson on 9/11. I plan to discuss with students what I believe are some important and, frankly, heartening messages that don't seem to get enough attention. Inevitably, we will have to discuss terrorism, but I will leave that lesson for another day. First, the survival instincts of the people who were physically involved in 9/11 were unbelievably strong. Yet, in what could be seen as a contradiction to our societal focus on the self, the survival instincts that day were focused on the group and were highly humanitarian. Exiting the WTC down crowded and smoke-filled flights of stairs, people stopped to help and comfort one another, carrying those who could no longer walk and giving articles of clothing to others to help cover wounds and shield eyes and lungs. All the while, the group kept moving. Immediately outside the towers, the need to comfort and help others overwhelmed the urge to evacuate the area quickly. I saw the same scenario reenacted as the collapse of the second tower chased me from the World Financial Centre boat basin north to Stuyvesant High School. People who couldn't run were being helped by those who were in better physical and emotional condition, regardless of the expanding cloud of debris that seemed about to engulf everything in its path. While all of these actions may be deemed small gestures of individual kindness and perhaps don't qualify as acts of high heroism, the lesson they can teach us and our students is that, in times of life- threatening crisis, human beings will put themselves and their own safety at risk to help one another. The mass chaos and panic that we see in movies and on television when, for example, aliens chase crowds through the streets thankfully exists only in fiction. In real life, the group experience of danger seems to protect, calm, and strengthen those who are experiencing it. …