It was a simple but revealing homework assignment for a group of fifth-grade girls at Van Bokkelen Elementary School in Severn: Come up with a list of questions you would like to ask your classmates.
Karen Gibson gathered the girls for their 45-minute class in a portable classroom last week and taped a line on the floor.
As she read from the girls' list of questions, she asked students to step on the line if they could answer yes to a question or agree with a statement she read.
FOR THE RECORD
In an article on Freedom Writers in Sunday's Anne Arundel section, Lee'Aisa Simms' name was misspelled. Also, in a caption with a related photograph, Rayven Richardson's name was misspelled.
The Baltimore Sun regrets the errors.
Students would then step back off the line to wait for the next question.
It started off easy: Step on the line if you like rap music. All but one of the girls moved forward before stepping back. Eight girls stepped on the line when asked whether they had a pet.
It didn't take long before the questions turned serious: Who knows someone who died in gang violence? Seven of the girls moved forward. Who has seen someone commit suicide? One girl slowly walked to the line, looking over both shoulders to see if anyone would join her. No one did.
This type of sharing might seem jarring, and it is meant to be. By opening up to each other through the spoken word, the girls are learning to express themselves through the written word, Gibson said.
The girls' next homework assignment: Write a poem or an essay in their marble notebook journals about how the line game made them feel.
Some of the girls already knew what they were going to write.
"It was fun, but sometimes I didn't want to go on the line," said LeeAsia Simms, who got choked up when recalling her Wednesday class.
The exercise is familiar to those who have seen the 2007 Paramount Pictures movie, Freedom Writers. The film tells the true story of an English class in a rough, gang-ridden, high school where the teacher finally wins the students' attention and respect by getting them to open up in their journals.
Students who had been written off by teachers and administrators raised their reading and writing test scores. Many were the first in their families to go to college.
Their journals eventually were published in a book called The Freedom Writers Diary. The students took the name from the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who challenged racism on bus trips to the segregated South during the 1960s.
