Paraphrased retelling because it's beautiful.
So there she is, a student in Illinois. It's social studies class. The teacher is a shitbag who nobody really likes or respects, constantly drunk on the job teaching middle schoolers. Sometime during the first hour of 9/11, all of the kids become aware of it. It's on the television and they're close enough to Chicago that they're worried about follow-up attacks.
Her teacher, visibly wasted, is unnerved and doesn't know what to do. Mind you this is social studies, the most basic form of a combined history/sociology/anthropology/geopolitics class, and the children are watching the most important event of their lives thus-far. The kind of thing where any amount of context whatsoever, any kind of historical reference point, would give the experience grounding so it isn't a senseless metal tornado. The hero's moment for a social studies teacher where he can genuinely change the course of the entire class' lives if he just gives the right message of hope with understanding.
He picks up his phone and pretends the president is calling him. Then he drunkenly announces to the children that he knows George Bush and the president just told him everything will be fine. At this point I don't know if the Pentagon/field planes had even hit yet, but he rose to the occasion and used it to get shitfaced and lie to crying children about being cool. The kids were split between believing him and ones like my crush immediately telling her parents that her teacher got drunk and lied about a terrorist attack.
What if Coach McGuirk from Home Movies had to explain 9/11 to kids in the moment. She got to live that and was consistently horrified that I found him to be an antihero.
Lol that sounds horrifying.
I had a teacher who told us on the first day of class about how he was on the phone with someone in the towers when it got hit. He was also drunk at work.
you say that like you earnestly expect someone to put up with children while sober
Alcoholism is more common in teachers than average, but it's not the majority of teachers. So, yes
If someone I loved died that way while on the phone with me I’d get hammered at work too.
Edit: Wait, are you saying he was just drunk at work telling you this shit years later? Because that is fucking weird lol
He was telling us this in class, while hammered - and he did specify it was someone he was working with - I mean extremely heavy shit to put on a 14 year old regardless.