![]() ![]() Following many of the questions, a majority of students stood, enabling them, perhaps for the first time, to realize how common these situations are. Among other queries, she asked if anyone had ever been bullied, or knew someone who abused drugs. Through a series of increasingly probing questions, students were asked to stand if they had experienced some of the common stressful situations faced by teens. On Thursday she used a similar game to send a message of unity to the El Roble students. ![]() The idea was to get them to recognize their shared struggle, living in poverty and violence, rather than viewing the world as a battleground they faced alone. ![]() At the end of the game, most of the students stood face to face on the line. Gruwell invented a game in which her students stood facing each other on either side of a line drawn down the center of the classroom, and then approached the line in response to various questions about their interests and their lives. Gruwell asked rhetorically, “why have they already given up?” However, she was undeterred perhaps because she saw that more than pity or handouts, they wanted a hand up. “What would make a 14-year-old so angry that he would take gun and shoot randomly?” Ms. This was the environment that her students endured every day.Ī student named Maria who showed up on the first day of class with a black eye and an ankle monitor wrote in an essay book: “ ‘I hate Erin and if I weren’t on probation I’d probably shank (stab) her.’ ” Another named Darius put it this way, “ ‘I feel like I come from an undeclared war.’ ” During that year, 126 young people were killed in Long Beach, according to Ms. Gruwell’s class were largely black and Hispanic, many were gang members and most had friends or family who had been murdered. ![]() It was a year after the Los Angeles riots and an extremely violent time in the history of southern California. She began Thursday’s talk by introducing some of those former students from room 203 who attended Long Beach’s Woodrow Wilson High School 1994. In the beginning, all she had was a room full of disenfranchised and disillusioned teens with three things in common: they did not like each other, school or their new English teacher. The proceeds from the book paid for the students’ college educations and empowered them to change the course of their lives. The result was a collection of these students’ stories called “The Freedom Writers Diary” which became a number one best selling book and a movie starring Hilary Swank. She achieved this by convincing her class that if they wrote their life stories other people would be interested. For almost two hours last Thursday, one woman held a gymnasium full of middle school students transfixed with the unbelievable tale of how a group of teenagers changed their lives with the simple power of the written word.ĭuring two assemblies at El Roble Intermediate School, Erin Gruwell related how, as a first year English teacher in one of the Southland’s worst high schools, she used determination and a belief in the ability of one person to make a difference to turn 150 of the school’s worst students into college graduates and individuals who want to change the world. ![]()
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