It’s sixth grade and my classmates and I arrive to art class. The TV is on and we see a burning building and the teacher is crying and we don’t do anything in class that day.

Most of us are pleased about the free class. Though we live in South Jersey, the World Trade Center is a far-off entity we’ve heard of but don’t really understand. It sounds important. But even as we try to enjoy the free period, we can’t ignore this sense that something is happening, that this isn’t just some tragedy in a place somewhere else. So we chatter nervously among ourselves and try to ignore that somber television.

Later, when the second plane hits and Ms. Heiser, whose daughter worked in one of the buildings, collapses and screams in the middle of class and my father, a newspaper editor, sits the family down to explain what he knows, I finally feel the hurt and fear of a nation and my 11-year-old self breaks down and cries.

In history that day, Ms. Moss had told us that we will never forget where we were, what we did, what was said on this day — the way our parents remember when John F. Kennedy is shot. And though I struggled to understand the scope of what happened on Sept. 11, I never did.