I NEVER MET Marlyn del Carmen Garcia, whose graduation portrait I stared up at with sadness for almost six years. My first day of student teaching in Brooklyn, New York, was on Sept. 11, 2001, the day Marlyn died on the 101st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. She had been the valedictorian of our school’s first graduating class a few years earlier, and in the days following 9/11, her framed portrait was hung in our main hallway.