How Did Ms. Gruwell Change Lives

Her father was having trouble making end meet. His new job would only give him part-time hours. Their family could not exist off of his salary along, so Shirley’s mother went to work a domestic worker. Shirley was the oldest, so she got the latch key. They were told to stay in the house and not to open the door for no one until their mother got home. Finally her father began to work full-time and he was promoted to supervisor at his job. Shirley’s mom quit working her domestic job; but she would always be a seamstress. While leaving in Brooklyn Shirley and her family lived in the worst tenement apartments and what we now call ghettos. One apartment they lived in was so cold, that during the winter, they just closed off one room and all the sisters slept in one bedroom. Shirley was affected by the cold for the rest of her life after that experience. They did move to another apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant. He father became a janitor and the apartment was free. The High School she attended was all women mostly white, but the neighborhood was predominately black. Shirley parent keep a tight rein on their girls. In fact she never had a regular date in high school or college. She had good study habits and a high IQ, which garnered a few scholarships in schools out of town, but her parents could not afford the room and board. Shirley would attend Brooklyn City College. At this point Shirley knew very

How often do you see a white teacher transform a class full of recalcitrant students from different races and backgrounds to a class full of great individuals? That is what happened in the movie Freedom Writers. Erin Gruwell is the white teacher and the students are class 203 of Woodrow Wilson High School. At the beginning, class 203 is just a bunch of people who hate learning and have no future. However, it all changes since the presence of Erin Gruwell. She approaches this unteachable class and starts to develop their emotional intelligence. From students who like to neglect the lesson, refuse listening to the teacher, and do not care about each other, they start to show changes in their learning skill. Ultimately, two of the

Throughout the film, the effects of stereotype can be seen vastly in the film by Margaret Campbell, the department head. She grouped all of Mrs. Gruwell’s students together as street kids and set very low expectations for them. She is constantly seen telling Mrs. Gruwell that she is wasting her time on the students simply because she keep emphasizing on how the students are only destructive and incapable of higher learning. She also refuses to give them new books because she believes that they can't read them and would not return them. She is also determined to consistently fight Mrs. Gruwell’s efforts to engage the students in learning.

“Freedom Writers” is a powerful film that is based on a true story about a teacher named Erin Gruwell, who struggles to connect with her students to make them believe that they can succeed in life, and to show them that their lives, experiences, and knowledge is valuable, all while attempting to unify them and to overcome racial segregation and gang violence that is part of their daily lives. Gruwell focuses on introducing the concepts of discipline and obedience in her classroom. She gradually begins to earn their trust and buys them composition books to record their diaries, in which they talk about their experiences of being abused, seeing their friends die, and being evicted; Gruwell refers to the composition books as “The Freedom Writers Diary.”

She loved going to school everyday and was excited to have the opportunity to learn. She was faced with a challenge of being one of the first kids to make a school intergrated during this time period. At her highschool she was the only African American girl. Even now, she loves to learn new material that she can use. An example of this is during the Apollo Moon landing program.

Even, when the students seem careless and do not tolerate the professor, Gruwell guided by her ideals and big heart refuses to allow her students to be incompetent and gave her students a chance to overcome the limitations imposed on them by society and themselves. She encouraged them to do something remarkable and memorable and assign them a journal where they could feel free to express their emotions and feeling and essentially tell the stories that define them. Gruwell draws students’ attention by assigning them The Diary of Anne Frank, a book that promptly become a guide for the students and open their minds and eyes against intolerance and misunderstanding. Inspired by this book, the students raised funds to bring Miep Gies, the woman who sheltered the Frank family, to visit them in California where she declared that the students are the real heroes.

The students started in write in the Journal that she supplied them with. They wrote about their lives with involved violence and hatred that had against everyone in their school. As a class they joined all their journals together and published a book. She had faith in the students and showed dedication, She also gave them hope, She had patience there was times that she could have exploded but she didn't, She was Selfless she put the students before her own relationship. This

We all face different and difficult obstacles in our lives. Many of those types of situations can affect our education. As we see and read about the Freedom Writers’ Diaries we can acknowledge that each individual faces in his/hers life involving racism, gang

Experiences That Helped Them Grow In the movie The Freedom Writers, Ms. Gruwell makes an effort for her students. She treats them with things such as take them on trips to museums, out for fancy dinners, buy new books to give to her students and also provides her students with computers after finding a donor. Receiving these luxuries causing the students to feel a wide range of emotions and impacts them vastly. For example when Ms. Gruwell took them to the Holocaust museum which caused her students to feel a lot of mixed emotions.

Freedom Writers is a film based on a true story about a young teacher, Erin Gruwell, who faces racial barriers at an integrated high school in Long Beach California. The article displays the teaching methods used by Gruwell in order to help her students face their academic struggles that are obstructed by their everyday lives. Choi divides Gruwell’s methods of teaching into four main categories. Such as, rewriting curriculum, treating student’s creators of knowledge, creating a classroom community, and teaching self realization. Once Gruwell knew what type of students she was managing she immediately knew that she would have to modify her teaching methods. Choi insists that Gruwell and her revolutionary pedagogy began when she changed the school curriculum according to the interests of her class. “This decision

“Everybody thinks you should be happy just because you’re young. They don’t see the wars that we fight every single day”. Brandy Ross, one of the students in the movie Freedom Writers once said. This is the predicament that the students in Woodrow Wilson High School faced every day. There are dead bodies on the street, the students have to protect themselves from other gangs, and most of them didn’t finish high school. It might not be a big issue for us because we didn’t face it by ourselves, but after watching this movie you will know that it is a significant thing to look at. The differences among race caused all of these problems, to deal with this is not easy at all. Freedom Writers show us that we can live our life with distinction because it shows us how to understand and accept dissimilarity that we have and also to

In the movie, The Freedom Writers Mrs. Erin Gruwell (Hillary Swank) plays a role of a dedicated teacher who did all she could, to help her students learn to respect themselves and each other. She has little idea of what she's getting into when she volunteers to be an English teacher at a newly integrated high school in Long Beach, California. Her students were divided along racial lines and had few aspirations beyond basic survival. Mrs. Gruwell was faced with a big challenge when a group of freshmen students showed her nothing but disrespect which made it hard for her to communicate, teach and understand them. However, Erin Gruwell was determined that no matter the cost she would teach her students not only

The film Freedom Writers directed by Richard La Gravenese is an American film based on the story of a dedicated and idealistic teacher named Erin Gruwell, who inspires and teaches her class of belligerent students that there is hope for a life outside gang violence and death. Through unconventional teaching methods and devotion, Erin eventually teaches her pupils to appreciate and desire a proper education. The film itself inquiries into several concepts regarding significant and polemical matters, such as: acceptance, racial conflict, bravery, trust and respect. Perhaps one of the more concentrated concepts of the film, which is not listed above, is the importance and worth of education. This notion is

The movie Freedom Writers is about Erin Gruwell who is starting her first year as an English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School. This school is racially divided with many gangs and violence erupting at any time. Ms. Gruwell was the students main subject of hate too. After having a discussion with her students about what they were feeling about their lives and situations, she took the responsibility of educating the students no matter what the cost was. She would eventually get through to the teens by passing out journals for them to write their personal life stories in. As the year went on, the students started to trust Ms.Gruwell. The next academic year, she had the students getting along with one another and reading The Diary of Ann Frank. She faced many critics within the school, but she ultimately succeeded.

In this movie I learned that being a teacher isn’t easy, you will face many problems about students not wanting to do work that you assign. In Freedom Writers the teacher faces many problems when she realized that her students don’t know how to read or write. She over comes this by giving them journals to write how they feel and they are given the option to leave their journals or take them home. Most of the students leave them there so she can read them. By the end of the movie her students seemed to be at their own level. This inspired me to be a teacher even more because she showed a sign of strength and no matter how much hate people said she never