GALLATIN, TN—Furrowing his brow and nervously swinging his legs beneath his desk during his end-of-unit American History test, Sycamore Elementary fourth-grader Todd Ackerman reportedly found himself drawing a complete blank Monday on which year the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. “I know it begins with a two, and I remember it was near ‘Barack Obama becomes president’ on our study timeline, but was it 2005? 2007?” said Ackerman under his breath, squinting down at his fill-in-the-blank test and firmly pressing his small fist against his forehead as he tried to recall whether the largest terrorist attack in American history happened before or after the Iraq War. “Think, think, think. It’s got to be 2011, right? Yeah, that sounds right.” At press time, Ackerman was on his third attempt to spell the name “Hurricane Katrina.”

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