Chapter 12: When Your Lesson Plans End up on the Front Page

Like thousands of high school teachers I had to teach a lesson to bewildered adolescents only hours after the terrorists brought down the World Trade Center and destroyed a portion of the Pentagon a few miles from my suburban high school in northern Virginia. The planned lesson on Locke and Hobbes would wait for another day.

I also had a new guest in the class that afternoon—a reporter from USA TODAY. The next day would bring another reporter, this time from The Washington Post. Within a year I ended up on television and radio shows and quoted in newspapers across the country. As is traditional in the pack nature of journalism, my name ended up in many reporters’ Rolodexes.