For Fraught Preteen Years, A Class on Being a Friend

In one exercise, Dunne asked her students to plot the history of one of their friendships on a timeline, with all its ups and downs.

"I met Cynthia on the bus at the beginning of the year," said Harold Mongoue, as she described her timeline to the class. "But then a few weeks later, it went down, because she wasn't speaking to me, and she was spending time with other friends. Then we talked again and it went up."

Dunne tells her students that "friendships don't end." Even on the days they feel ignored or excluded, their old buddies usually come back around. So instead of writing them off, she encouraged them to think of ways to combat their dejected feelings -- eat popcorn or take a bath.

When Dunne came up with the idea for the class in January 2003, she was working at Spring Hill Elementary School in McLean. She said parents were coming to her with concerns about their children's behavior: "My daughter's so mean; what can I do?" or, sometimes, "My daughter's getting bullied; what can I do?"

She started a seminar series for the parents, which included a presentation by Wiseman. For the girls, she began her first class on friendship. The principal incorporated the class into the standard curriculum for fifth-grade girls.

The early version of her class was geared toward counteracting the different types of bullying that she found. Girls were more likely to judge one another based on how they dressed or whether they had been invited to go on vacation with certain girls' families.

Online bullying was big in McLean, she said. Girls would learn each other's passwords, then send nasty massages in other people's names.

At Park Lawn, where she took a job two years ago, most of her students had never heard of Instant Messenger, and the bullying was more traditional name-calling and ignoring.

Here, 62 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches and nearly half speak a language other than English at home. Recently, Dunne asked her students to write down the things that trouble them at home, and they filled a board with anxieties written on pink and purple sticky notes: "gun shoots," "my mom in the bill trouble," "my life . . . what will happen?"

Dunne said she teaches that good friends are people who can be good listeners, who can lend a shoulder in times of trouble. She said she watched the girls become closer after their long group discussions. They went from sitting in twos or threes in class to tumbling out the door at recess to play basketball and skip rope together.

Fourth-grader Maryama Hussein took the class lessons to heart. "A true friend cares about you, is there for you," she said. Her best friend moved all the way to Manassas last year, but she learned that when you find a true friend, it's important to hold on to her.