The Real Teacher Behind the Movie
Erin Gruwell with some students from Room 203 on the cover of their book, The Freedom Writers Diary.
Following the Rodney King Riots and the O.J. Simpson trial, the mood in LA was unsettling, and on our first day of high school, we had only three things in common: We hated school, we hated our teacher, and we hated each other.
Whether it was official or not, we all knew we had been written off as “unteachable,” “below average,” “delinquents.” Low test scores, juvenile hall, and racial hostility helped us fit the labels the educational system placed on us.
Somehow, our English teacher, Ms. Gruwell, recognized our similarities, and used them to unite us. She gave us books written by teenagers that we could all relate to, and it was through these books that we began to realize that if we could relate to a little girl who lived on the other side the world, 50 years before we did, we could certainly relate to each other.
We felt like Anne Frank, trapped in a cage, and we identified with the violence in Zlata Filipovic's life in Sarajevo. We were so inspired by the stories of Anne and Zlata, that we wrote letters to Miep Gies, and to Zlata, in hopes that they would come to Long Beach and share their stories with us. When Miep visited us, she challenged us to keep Anne's memory alive and “passed the baton” to us. It was then that we decided to begin chronicling our lives.
We began writing anonymous journal entries about the adversities we faced. We wrote about gangs, immigration, drugs, violence, abuse, death, anorexia, dyslexia, teenage love, weight, divorce, suicide, and all the other issues we never had the chance to express before. We discovered that writing is a powerful form of self expression that could help us deal with our past and move forward. Room 203 was like Anne's attic or Zlata's basement; it was our safe haven, where we could cry, laugh, and share our stories without being judged.
We decided to call ourselves the Freedom Writers after the Freedom Riders who fought against segregation during the Civil Rights Movement. When we began writing these entries as a simple English assignment for Ms. G, we had no idea that they would one day become a book, The Freedom Writers Diary, and then a movie starring Hilary Swank.
Since graduation, we have kept our promise of trying to change education. We are pursuing our undergraduate and graduate degrees, many of us at California State University, Long Beach, and continuing to share our story and mentor students across the country about what it's like to receive a second chance.
Freedom Writer Maria Reyes, in a recent interview: “What was different with Ms. G was that regardless of what we thought about ourselves, what we believed to be true, she believed something completely different. That we could put behind us any choices that we'd made in our lives before, and that it was the choices we made from that point on that mattered. And she just stuck it out, she didn't give up on us, ever.”
This article originally appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Winter 2007.
