Kathleen Palladino teaches 9/11 for kids at St. Patrick Catholic Academy in Brooklyn, but her students are only 3 years old. On Friday, 25 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she was still working through how to turn memory into a lesson children can understand.
Kathleen Palladino and Brooklyn memory
Palladino was a 6-year-old kindergartner in Brooklyn on Sept. 11, when classmates were called over the school PA system to go home. She was picked up by her mother and older sister and walked home while looking toward Manhattan.
She remembered the scene in blunt terms: “It was like a dividing line,” she said. “From the bridge backwards was just blackness.” She also remembered asking, “Mommy, why is the sky black?”
St. Patrick Catholic Academy in Bay Ridge
Now a nursery school teacher at St. Patrick Catholic Academy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, she said her 3-year-old students were born more than two decades after the attacks. That age gap shapes the lesson. At that stage, the goal is not to unpack the full history of Sept. 11, but to give children a simple, age-appropriate first frame for a day they will hear about again later in school.
Kathy Curatolo, the principal, brings another first-person memory into the same building. She watched one of the towers collapse from a school roof on the morning of Sept. 11, and did not know that her youngest brother, Robert Curatolo, a 31-year-old FDNY firefighter, was underneath the tower that collapsed.
3-year-old students and 25 years
Palladino drew the clearest line between those memories and the classroom. “I don't go into the events of 9/11,” she said. The children are too young, and the scope of what happened is beyond their understanding right now.
That leaves the teachers with a narrower job: introduce the date, keep the language simple, and make sure the story stays rooted in the city the children know. For these students, 9/11 is history. For the adults teaching them, it is still part of daily memory.
The open question is what lesson they want those students to carry as they get older and can absorb more of what happened in New York City.
