Almost every college student in the nation could tell you where they were 10 years ago Sunday. With the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 only days away, students at Grand Valley State University are not just talking about it, they’re taking an entire class on it.

HNR 312, or “Remembering 9/11” is a 16-member class in the Honors College that meets the junior seminar requirement. They meet twice a week in Niemeyer and come from all over campus, with majors ranging from accounting majors to physician assistants to natural resource management.

But despite the differences in their programs, they’re all taking the class for similar reasons.

“I remember clearly the day when it happened, and it’s something that’s changed our lives so much that I think I wanted to just take a class to know more about it,” said Kristen Hayes, secondary education major. “You know, we were younger then, and we knew what happened, but we didn’t really understand what was going on.”

Hayes is not alone. At her table sits Sandra Brinks, a history major who took this class out of not only curiosity, but to seek a connection to her Middle Eastern studies minor, along with Jessica Kean, a film and video major who echoed Hayes’ reasoning.

“I was really looking forward to the class, just because I was young enough when it happened that I understood that it was something really bad, but I was a little too young to really follow the news as to what happened,” Kean said. “So I was looking forward to the class just so I could understand a lot of the facts behind it that I didn’t know at the time.”

The course’s professor, Robert Franciosi, said the unique position that this generation of college students brings to remembering the events on Sept. 11, in combination with the 10th anniversary, are what spurred the idea to create a semester-long seminar on the subject.

“I may want to teach it again, but I thought this group in particular still has a very clear recollection of what happened when they were in fifth grade or whenever,” Franciosi said. “So I thought, well, that’s only going to last for a few more years, and eventually you’ll have college students who don’t have any memory of it. So at least for a few years it’s really interesting because you’re bringing so much more to the table as a student.”

Franciosi, who also teaches a similar class on the Holocaust, said this new class will ask some of the tough, bigger picture questions about what people remember, why people remember and how people remember. Currently, students are talking about the different forms of commemoration – on television, in print and online – and later in the semester, they’ll research controversies like the Muslim community center proposed near Ground Zero for their final exam.

“It’s interesting to me, and it’s hard to say right now, but none of them have a real close connection to New York as far as I can tell,” Franciosi said, adding that as a New York native who attended NYU in Manhattan, he has a strong emotional connection to the event. “I think what will be difficult for them to kind of get their heads around is the scale of it. I used a visual aid earlier in the class -because just getting a sense of how big these things were – you can’t understand what it’s like for someone to contemplate jumping out of a 100-story building until you can envision a 100-story building.”

Franciosi used a graphic from an architecture site, which projects an image of the World Trade Centers on the skyline of Grand Rapids to add perspective.

“They’ve all been in tall buildings, but they’ve never had to think: ‘You know, what would I do? What would I do if the elevators weren’t working? If I’m on the 10th floor or ninth floor of the Eberhard Center and the place is on fire and the elevators aren’t working. What would I do?’ And I think that they haven’t got to that point yet.”

He said he wants to use the class as an opportunity to allow students to not simply remember where they were on Sept. 11, but to take in the facts and draw fresher, more analytical conclusions of what happened. In his class, he asks students to take their respective disciplines and apply them to the documentation of 9/11.

“Some of the significance of 9/11, I think for these younger people, is that it does force you to start imagining your fragile place in the scheme of things,” Franciosi said. “If in the most secure country in the world, the most powerful country in the world can get hit like that – if people who worked for investment firms, who were really at the top of the world financially, culturally, literally even. If these people can find themselves hanging out of a window 90 floors up – on some level it should at least register with the students the fragility of life. It doesn’t take much; everything can be changed in an instant.”

And although many who watched the towers fall on TV may have done so at a distance, students like Hayes are gearing up for an emotional semester of remembering.

“I think it’s definitely going to be an emotional thing,” she said. “Even the book we just started reading now, I find myself having to stop every once and a while. You can’t read it all at once; it’s a lot to take in. Even 10 years later, it’s a lot to take in.”

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