Deadline Reporting: Terrorism on September 11.

Abstract As the eyes and ears of the community, journalists must disasters--natural and man-made. Yet it's difficult to teach students how to a tragedy or how to write a story under harrowing circumstances in the classroom setting, where discussion is theoretical and reactions can only be imagined. September 11th presented an opportunity to convey a lesson in reporting and writing that might stay with my students for years to come. But I hesitated to take that opportunity. Were my students ready? Was I? ********** On September 11th, I was scheduled to teach a weekly class in Deadline Reporting to the graduate students in the journalism program at Concordia. An hour before the noontime class, a handful of students stood outside my office door. I'm a native New Yorker, transplanted to Canada in 1990, and I'd shed some tears in private that morning already, unable to reach my own family members in Manhattan. When I came to the door to greet my students, my eyes, I'm certain, mirrored the same shock, uncertainty and numbness that their eyes carried. They wanted to know if there would be a class. At that moment, I really didn't know. The director of the journalism department told me I didn't have to teach if I didn't feel up to it. I still hadn't made contact with my family at that point, and was particularly worried about my sister, who worked near the financial district. And, underneath the worry, I had sentimental feelings. I was married in Tower One of the World Trade Center in Windows on the World. Now, the memory of that unusually warm Saturday night in November, when a massive New York traffic jam almost made me late for my own wedding, played over and over in my mind. Should I teach? Could I teach? And if I did teach, what would I teach? I had planned to have a young reporter from Canadian Press (CP) talk about her own experiences reporting on deadline in the second half of the class. I'd set up the event as an assignment, whereby the students would cover her talk and then immediately exit the classroom to write a story on deadline. Now, with the magnitude of unfolding events, the topic of Deadline Reporting seemed at once particularly pertinent yet strangely irrelevant. How could I ask students to fully concentrate on a speaker when world events were so distracting? And how could I ask them to write up the talk after class, when they, like everyone else, would want to focus on the events into which we were all plunged that day? Another teacher in the department, perhaps sensing my agitation, diverted my attention momentarily from my own dilemma by telling me about new classroom space that the department had acquired. We walked down four flights of stairs to check out the now empty classroom and determine its feasibility for a class of twenty. The whole excursion took only fifteen minutes, but leaving my worry beads for even a short time made me feel better. The outing clinched my decision. I would teach. I reasoned it would help me feel less powerless if I was in the classroom trying to do something. But what? Should I carry on with my planned lesson? Should I alter some of it and keep the rest? Should I scrap it all and do something completely different? Should I cancel the speaker? Emotions were running sky high, mine as well as my students, and they were clearly looking at me for direction. I decided to abandon my own lecture that day and to proceed with the speaker at the top of the class. I managed to reach her on her cell phone and ask her to come early, which she was able to do. In the classroom, before introducing the speaker, I told my students not to worry about writing a story off the talk. I wanted to relieve them of that burden and let us all simply listen. The speaker happened to be extremely engaging, and the students paid rapt attention. Like me, they seemed both to welcome the distraction she provided and to relate to her as a young person who'd achieved considerable success in a field they might like to pursue. …

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