Excerpt from the Sarasota Florida Herald Tribune

By DAVID BALL
Correspondent

( page 1 of 3 )

OSPREY - Stephany Fournier, an 11th-grader at Pine View School, did not want to punish her fellow classmates, but it had to be done. They defied the law.

Pine View School junior Arianna Robbins, left, listens to orders from junior Stephany Fournier, who was playing the part of an army general within an East German command center at the school. Stephany ordered swift punishment for enemies of the state.

"I'm normally a nice person, but I have to be really firm with these people," Stephany said. "They must come in, sit down and write this line on paper, front and back."

The line: "I will serve the glorious East German state better."

The students copied it repeatedly after watching a propaganda film depicting the evils of Western culture.

The drill was part of a history lesson taken to an elaborate level Tuesday at Pine View, where Stephany and the rest of the 2,000 students participated in an interactive lesson commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

"This was a project of the history club, and their idea was that students should really have an idea of what it was like to live in a communist state," said social studies teacher Patricia Johnston, who helped organize the project and served as the lead "comrade."

Students, with the help of a local landscaping company, erected a nearly 100-foot paper replica of the Berlin wall, complete with graffiti. It stood across the middle of the campus to mimic the concrete wall that separated communist East Germany from capitalist West Germany from 1961 to the end of 1989.

On the west side, students could walk around, socialize and behave as they normally do.

But on the east side, students could only walk on sidewalks, wear approved clothing (no hats, for instance) and had to behave in an orderly, controlled fashion.

Excerpt from the Sarasota Florida Herald Tribune

Full Story Here: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100224/ARTICLE/2241029?p=1&a...