I doubt there are very many people that would describe educational scholar Farhat Shahzad’s article on interpretive communities as groundbreaking material.  Going into the article, I was expecting a new insightful take on the way which students are influenced by their environment and how it models their learning.  While it was well written and efficiently made its point, I came out of it underwhelmed and doubted whether Shahzad said anything noteworthy at all.  That said, the article has led me to rethink certain subjects such as the role of emotions in remembering history.

When the attack on the World Trade Center transpired I was only five years old, and  due to my young age I was obviously unable to grasp the magnitude or severity of the event.  My mother was from up-state New York and had friends living in Manhattan during the attack.  During the days following the attack I recall my mother being extremely worried talking about how scared her friends must be living in New York City.  The shock of the attacks on 9/11 has ensured that it is an event that will be remembered into the far future.

In high school I was fortunate to have been the student of some truly exceptional teachers.  My favorite was a history teacher, who had a wealth of knowledge and approached his material very methodically.  When discussing 9/11, he placed a heavy importance on logical analysis of the event and warned not to be swayed by over emotional sources.  I found this to be very intelligent, and began to more or less disregard emotion when analyzing history.  I failed to acknowledge that emotions play a crucial role in remembering and recording.  Our desire to record events comes from our emotional attachment to them.   Without emotional attachment, no one would bother to record.