NEW YORK — On September 11, 2001, Annie Thoms emerged from the subway at Chambers Street to find a crowd of people staring upward.

“I looked up and saw, you know, the flames, and the smoke and something falling from the buildings, and I asked somebody, what had happened, and they said two planes had hit. And then I realized that what was falling from buildings was people. And I thought, oh my God, I have to get to school,” she said.

Thoms was 25 years old, in her second year of teaching English at Stuyvesant High School, her alma mater. Hours later, the school would be evacuated, and students wouldn’t return to the building until October. Even then, the smell of smoke hung in the air.

“It was very hard for everybody. I mean, we all sort of were trying to get back to normal but it wasn't clear what normal could be,” she recalled.

It was a dynamic teachers across the city had to navigate, but a particularly pronounced one at Stuyvesant, where students had to cross police barricades to get back to class. Thoms noticed students sharing their own personal stories about that day on message boards online, and she thought of the work of Anna Deavere Smith. The playwright and actor is known for her use of interview-based monologues — interviewing a subject and performing their words verbatim.

“I thought okay, well what if, when we come back, we try to capture some of those stories,” she said.

That idea led to a play: "With Their Eyes." Ten student actors interviewed 23 people in the Stuyvesant community, and performed their recollections as monologues. Some students, exhausted by the media attention and disaster tourism around the school, weren’t happy about it. Thoms and her students didn’t shy away from those feelings.

“One of the interviewees actually, a senior named Max Willens, was extremely opposed to the play — and then he became a part of it as an interviewee, and so he was able to express, you know, his frustration and anger,” she said.

The play was performed in February of 2002, and then turned into a book, published by Harper Collins, now re-released in connection with the twentieth anniversary of the attacks. Thoms still uses it as a text each year in her English classes, and has found new resonance in some of the monologues amid the pandemic, as students' lives are once again disrupted.

One of the play’s monologues is from a Muslim student experiencing racial profiling after the attacks. It connected with Thoms’s Asian American students as hate crimes spiked.

“That monologue in particular resonated with them very powerfully, and led to a really interesting discussion about the ways that a crisis like this can be an opportunity for unity and solidarity, but can also lead to this terrible scapegoating,” she said.

Discussions like those happen in classrooms around the city and the state, with the state social studies framework including lessons on the attacks at several grade levels. The city’s education department also offers educators resources to help them talk about that day, which happened before today’s students were born.

“We can only learn from history if we have a full understanding of what happened. And what happened is not a single story — what happened is a great collection of stories and different experiences,” Thoms said.

Stories Thoms and her former students helped to document forever, still educating others 20 years later.