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 The kind of thing where any amount of context whatsoever, any kind of historical reference point, would give the experience grounding so it isn't a senseless metal tornado.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.