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TOCQUEVILLE SOCIETY 'Unorthodox' teacher talks about teaching troubled teens
By MEGAN
KENNY STUART — In the mid-1990s, at a school in the heart of poverty-stricken Long Beach, Calif., first-year teacher Erin Gruwell worked miracles. At the Lyric Theatre Wednesday, Gruwell, now 37, told 500 teachers, social workers, students and child advocates how she turned a group of teenagers, labeled hopeless by the school system, into published authors who had a chance to make something of themselves. "What happens if you keep telling a kid they are stupid, they are dumb, they are nothing?" Gruwell said. "They believe you." Gruwell, a woman raised in a Los Angeles suburb and who was destined to be a lawyer, recalled the moment she decided to become a teacher, after witnessing the 1992 Los Angeles riots. On her first day, she arrived at school, dressed in polka dots and wearing pearls. As soon as she handed out her syllabus, one student, Darius, released from jail three years before and decked in gang colors, stood up and asked her a question. "Why do we have to read books by dead white guys in tights?" he asked, according to Gruwell. It was then she knew she had to find a way to relate literature to their lives. Gruwell marched out and bought books for all 150 of her students, whom she discovered were the students no one else wanted. She bought them Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl," "Night" by Elie Wiesel, and "Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo," to reach the teens living in their own war zones. She proposed a "Toast for Change," a do-over where past lives didn't matter. "Throughout my life, we were always raising a glass and toasting," she said. "But these kids didn't have much to celebrate." After reading about Anne Frank, the students saved money to bring in Miep Gies, the secretary who hid the Frank family. It was Gies who inspired them to write their stories, and the book "The Freedom Writers' Diary" was born. Before the hourlong presentation, Gruwell's fans lined up. Each told her how glad they were she had come. While signing copies, Gruwell talked about the movie soon to be released, starring Hilary Swank as Gruwell. Gruwell handpicked Swank for the role. "I didn't want another blonde bombshell," Gruwell said. While Gruwell no longer is in a traditional classroom, she still instructs teachers through the foundation she runs, the Freedom Writers' Foundation and the Erin Gruwell Educational Project. She also advocates outside-the-box teaching methods, and teaching to students as opposed to teaching to tests. "There is no one-size-fits-all method that engages kids," she said. "There has to be some unorthodoxy." WHO ARE THE FREEDOM WRITERS? • 150 inner-city students who made up teacher Erin Gruwell's first classes at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif. • After reading Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl" and other books written by children living in war-torn nations, and at the urging of Hermine "Miep" Santrouschitz-Gies, the secretary who hid the Frank family, the students began writing about their own lives. They called themselves the Freedom Writers after the 1960s civil rights activists, the Freedom Riders. • The diaries were collected and published as "The Freedom Writers' Diary" in 1999. Sales of the books support teacher training and a scholarship program, which has sent Freedom Writers through college. ERIN GRUWELL EDUCATION PROJECT • A scholarship program, established in 2002 in partnership with California State University, Long Beach, provides full financial and academic support to students who have financial or familial instability, are the first in their families to graduate from high school and attend college, speak English as a second language, have minor learning disabilities and were at risk of dropping out of high school. • Teacher training, a five-day seminar, giving educators the story of the Freedom Writers, and instructing on Gruwell's classroom methods. |
