Stardate 20030729.2322

(On Screen): Feel fear, my friends. America's grade schools are trying to decide how they should present the WTC/Pentagon attacks in their history classes.

Complicating matters further, textbooks, traditional staples of history classes, cannot keep pace with the endless flow of information. While some textbook companies were able to supply teachers with supplemental materials, like newspaper articles and lists of Internet sites about the Sept. 11 attacks, actual passages are only now appearing inside the books. Most school districts buy new books once every six years.

“We won’t get those new books for two more years,” laments Morrison, who teaches in Manchester, Mo., near St. Louis.

To a large extent, this leaves secondary and even grammar school teachers relying on their own wiles to incorporate 9/11 and the events that have followed in rapid fire order into the classroom.

“The integration is challenging,” Morrison says about bringing Sept. 11 material into her lessons. Morrison says that last year she juxtaposed the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa with Al Qaida’s Osama bin Laden. “Would Villa be considered a terrorist today,” Morrison asked her class?

Pancho Villa? She's comparing bin Laden to Villa? Villa is not one of history's more admirable characters, but what in hell has he got to do with bin Laden?

Sue Chase, who teaches an advanced placement course in U.S. government, has a similar approach.

“If you want kids to understand something you’ve got to tie it to a bigger picture,” says Chase, who teaches in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio.

“Obvious parallels exist,” Chase says, “especially when looking at World War II.” Some are well-trod ground: 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, for instance. Others are more subtle. For instance, Chase says she asked students to compare the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s to the increased scrutiny Arab-Americans have come in for following 9/11.

Increased scrutiny is being treated as potentially the same as internment?

Class, here is your examination on the historical events of 9/11:

1. List three ways in which American foreign policy angered the Arabs.

2. Explain the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter.

3. Essay question: explain the reasons for the attack. Extra credit will be given for correct use of the terms hegemony, imperialism, cultural genocide, Zionist pig, and crypto-nazi.