I was in sixth grade on Sept. 11, 2001. In the morning, I remember being left in our classrooms while some of the teachers talked outside in the hallway. A few of them were crying, but my classmates and I didn’t think too much of it until lunch. Fifth and sixth grades ate lunch together, and our principal told us what happened, in kid language (unfortunately).

After lunch at recess, we were convinced planes were going to rain down on us and a few kids were legitimately scared. Later that day, my teacher told me my aunt was fine and had walked 80 blocks home. I didn’t even know my aunt worked in the World Trade Center until then, but later found out the whole story. She was underneath one of the towers in the subway station when the first plane hit, and they all evacuated. My grandparents had to wait for hours to hear that she was okay.

Like most other people, I spent the rest of the day, week and month watching the news as much as I could. I wish we could have been watching the live news, and I think teachers underestimate how much we could have understood about what was going on. Although it wasn’t the first terrorist attack on America, it was definitely the most significant and changed more things about how our government and society functions than we realize.

Thinking back, I didn’t realize as a kid that I was witnessing the most significant event in American history since I’ve been alive. I wasn’t old enough to know people who decided to join the military after Sept. 11, but it definitely changed how my generation thinks about the world. We had grown up in a post-Cold War world where the United States was the last superpower standing, and suddenly it was under attack from a different threat than we had ever experienced before.