Jeff Kreifels arrived at Klahowya Secondary School at about 6:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001 – about seven minutes before five hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. It’s a 10-minute drive from his home to school, where he teaches, but he was listening to a Christian music station that solely played music while the nation began to hear of the two planes that had already crashed into the World Trade Center.

“I had no concept of it until I came into the building,” said Kreifels, recalling 9/11.

The teacher he shared an office with told him that a plane flew into a building. He immediately thought it must be some sort of “accident” — a small plane must have hit a building due to a pilot’s miscalculation.

Then he saw the images and videos being replayed on TV as small groups of teachers formed in different classrooms watching the news.

“I was in shock. I was losing track of time,” said Kreifels, 45. He added that the room he was in was quiet and no one was talking.

Nancy Marrill Hanners, Kreifel’s colleague who was the one that broke the news to him, said she didn’t know about the incident until she arrived at school that morning and saw news coverage of the attacks in the school office.

“I stood in disbelief, it felt much like the day President Kennedy was assassinated,” she said.

Around 7 a.m., students began arriving to school, and the principal gathered the staff to check in and make sure everyone was OK and that they were “on the same page” in terms of how they would go about the school day.

The initial direction was that it was fine to watch the news in the classrooms and that if students needed to see a counselor, they could do so, said Kreifels.

School started at 7:25 a.m. and Kreifels said that about half of his eighth grade students in his English and history class did not know about the attacks when they arrived. Either he or another student had to inform those who came to class not knowing anything about the South Tower of the World Trade Center, which had fallen by then.

“The smile or looking-forward-to-the-day look, it was gone. It was just a blank look,” he said of his students’ faces after they learned about what had happened in New York City.

For his first period class, they watched the TV. Into the second hour of the day, school administrators advised teachers to return to  their planned curriculum for the day.

His students were studying the U.S. colonies at the time, but they were not enthusiastic about covering it on 9/11, he said.

“The kids were asking the same questions the newscasters were: Why did this happen? Why was this not prevented?” Kreifels said. He tried to answer their question as best he could but they were the same questions he had. And although he never said it to his students, Kreifels thought to himself, “Is this done? How much worse is this going to get?”

After the school day, he talked with his wife, Kristi Kreifels, over the phone. She and their three daughters, who ranged in age from 4 to 8 at the time, were at a cabin on Anderson Island for a short vacation.

“I had an overwhelming sense of needing to protect my girls — not wanting to frighten them — but wanting to know what was going on myself,” she said.

That evening, Jeff Kreifels gathered with a few members of his church to pray for the nearly 3,000 victims and families from the events of the day.

Sept. 11, 2001 was a Tuesday and the rest of the school week the TV remained turned off in his classroom. Most of his students’ shock turned into anger a few days later, Jeff Kreifels said, adding that they had a “they can’t mess with America” attitude.

Months afterward, Jeff Kreifels said he continued to tell his students that life would not be the same.

“As restrictions are put on, higher security levels of alert, we’re not likely to go back to life before,” he said.

Now Jeff Kreifels teaches 10th grade U.S. History — still at Klahowya — and Advance Placement World History. The 9/11 terrorist attacks are included in the U.S. history textbook.

The events of 9/11 have become modern day examples of uses for the constitution, which helps Kreifels demonstrate to his students that the constitution is not “just a piece of paper.”

With 10 years gone, the events of 9/11 are now history by definition.

“As a history teacher, I was thinking wow, history is happening here,” Jeff Kreifels said.