Testimonial of An (At The Time) American Seventh Grader

I currently live in Akasaka, Tokyo, Japan and am a Junior in high school. I remember being in the 7th grade when we were still living in suburban Maryland, and in the middle of our Algebra 1 math class being held in the portables. My teacher had a SmartBoard set up, and we were going over the previous night's homework when (since the SmartBoard is hooked up to her computer) a Breaking News story flashed onto, and filled the, screen. The first thing I remember from the news story was a video of the second wave coming through the town with Fukushima Daiichi, and statistics and headlines rapidly zooming across the bottom of the screen. I remember there wasn't a whole lot of reporting or narrating going on on the news reporters' side, which is also why I distinctly remember hearing the high-definition roaring of the waves as they rushed through and took over the town. I remember the reporters' silence scared me and made me nervous, because it wasn't a normal thing to not hear the familiar voices reading major stories off the teleprompter. I remember being in total shock, and though I wasn't one-hundred-percent sure of what was happening, I remember crying in class. I remember I was sitting in the very front row, right in the center of the row (because I was one of those students) and directly in front the SmartBoard screen; I cried in front of the gaping mouths of everyone else's faces shocked and horrified by what they were watching. I remember that for the rest of the day, the teachers had the news channels up on their computers and had hooked up their computers to their classroom SmartBoards for the rest of us to watch each class, because there was always more "Breaking News" with each class period. I remember that day, that was the only story everyone was talking about at school, which was shocking seeing that not many expected middle school students to understand and sympathize with the situation as much as we did.