Freedom writers movie#
The absolute best lines in the movie Freedom Writers directly came straight from my students' journal entries.ĭo you see journaling as a means to an end - a way to get students excited about writing so they'll go on to write academic papers? Or do you think memoir writing has its own value?ĭefinitely both. And if one of my students wrote an incredible line, that also got thrown into the mix. I pulled sentences out of whatever we were reading and broke them down. Or you can use language to communicate all of these other things. I used that as a metaphor to help my students deconstruct sentences. The other one was a really fancy sandwich that had French bread, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, and heaps of turkey. One of them was a really simple sandwich: a piece of white bread, a piece of baloney, and another piece of white bread. At one point, I brought in two sandwiches. So I always tried to use different learning modalities - kinesthetic, auditory, visual, whatever might bring learning to life. When you're too robotic and scripted, the students tune you out. Were you able to teach your students the fundamentals of writing in the process of having them read and write memoirs?Ībsolutely. So while I'm excited that New Dorp is trying a new direction, to throw the baby out with the bathwater is really unfortunate. We're training teachers who work with at-risk kids in some poorest schools in the country, kids who have been written off. It negates all of those kids who are marginalized.Īt Freedom Writers, we do give a shit what those kids think and feel. 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.
Freedom writers 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? 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.
Freedom writers full#
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.
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