Author: The Freedom Writer’s with Erin Gruwell
Publisher: Broadway Books
Book Type: Current Affairs
Pages: 290
Reviewer: Paris Renfroe
Date: 1999
Summary
The Freedom Writer’s Diary
On the eastside of Long Beach, California Erin Gruwell is just starting her first teaching job at Woodrow Wilson High school. She is a freshman and sophomore English teacher. Ms .Gruwell is unprepared for the students living by violence and gang activity .Many of the students are in gangs and most of them know someone that has been killed by gang violence. The Latinos hate the Cambodian’s who hate the Blacks. The only person the students hate more is Ms Gruwell. The students think she is a stuck up teacher that does not know anything about living in the hood.
Ms. Gruwell provides the class with a writing assignment they are to write in a daily journal which would not be graded, and will remain unread by her unless they choose. After giving the assignment, members of the class opened up to each other, breaking out of rigidly defined racial identities. She had no idea what the students went through out side of her class.
The journey to tolerance was helped by Ms.Gruwell’s use of world literature, especially the recollections of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of another author, Anne Frank. After reading “Anne Frank’s diary”, the students realized they were not the only ones persecuted. The Holocaust’s impact on the kids was so strong, Ms. Gruwell wanted to teach them more. She took them to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and she introduced them to several Holocaust Survivors. By visiting these horrors of recent history, they began to open their eyes to the futility and horror of racial hatred.
Opinion:
Erin Gruwell was an amazing teacher. She taught her kids that most of there parents or anyone in there family would never teach them. She taught them there education is important and they...