#THE FREEDOM WRITERS DIARLY HOW TO#
#THE FREEDOM WRITERS DIARLY MOVIE#

When I read that quote from David Coleman saying, 'As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don't give a shit about what you feel or what you think' - that's a very cavalier comment.

But where I saw huge cause for alarm in that piece was the idea that we don't want to focus on memoirs. Students have to be able to think critically. Peg Tyre's Atlantic story is about New Dorp High School, a low-performing school that traded in journaling and creative writing for more a rigorous academic curriculum. The question was, how do you engage a kid from who, from the get-go, doesn't want to read or write? So I thought, 'I'm going to go out and find stories that matter to them - stories by Alice Walker and Gary Soto and Amy Tan, people writing about things that are so relevant to these kids who can't see a future outside their own community.' I love 'a rose is a rose is a rose,' but when you have your students sit down and deconstruct Tupac's 'The Rose That Grew From Concrete,' they think, 'Wow, this teacher cares enough about us to find subject matters in our world.' In the beginning, when my syllabus kept coming back to me in the form of a paper airplane, the students kept asking, 'Why do we have to read books by dead white guys in tights?' Part of the challenge, for me, was to model great writing.

#THE FREEDOM WRITERS DIARLY HOW TO#

I had to learn how to make things relevant to them. When I first walked into that classroom, there were 150 kids who hated writing, hated me, hated everything. What happened in real life when you tried to teach those kinds of lessons?

#THE FREEDOM WRITERS DIARLY MOVIE#

There's a scene in the movie Freedom Writers where Hillary Swank is standing helplessly in front of a blackboard, trying to teach essay writing while the students revolt. Today, Gruwell runs the Freedom Writers Foundation, which aims to help teachers 'engage, enlighten, and empower at-risk students to reach their full potential.' She spoke with Atlantic senior editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz about the October magazine story 'The Writing Revolution' and her conviction that personal writing still belongs in the classroom.

Their poignant personal essays were later published in The Freedom Writers Diary, a book that inspired the 2007 film Freedom Writers. Frustrated by her efforts to inspire her low-achieving students, she handed out journals and asked the kids to write about their own lives. In the early 1990s, a young schoolteacher named Erin Gruwell made a radical change in her curriculum. Hillary Swank, portraying Erin Gruwell, fist-bumps with a student in Freedom Writers.

The freedom writers diarly