I was an impressionable, lively high school senior...
...and had not long since gotten out of Physics class. Next door, in the Biology classroom, the teacher had set up an elaborate system of televisions and speakers to commemorate the event and allow it to be viewed by anyone that wished...a sort of vicarious field trip, if you will. Sadly, the explosion barely a minute into the flight stunned him deeply (I heard later he was among the fifty finalists to be the teacher that went on the Shuttle mission), and there was actually even talk of cancelling the rest of the school day, so gripping and complete was the horror so many of us felt. As an odd side note, I was one of the few that could swear he saw the escape pod jettison away from the blast, but even more tragically, it was determined later that some of the crew members lived through the entire fall the pod made through the sky. The late Christa McAuliffe would have turned 61 this year and likely had been heading into retirement. :sad:
