by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
B+ Rated PG-13 123 min
For two time Oscar winner Hilary Swank, finding a worthwhile project for her own production company had been difficult. However, this inspiring and powerful true story of a remarkable teacher Erin Gruwell, adapted from The Freedom Writers Diary, was something she had to produce. Swank stars as Gruwell set in the turbulent early 1990s in an inner-city high school that had all but given up on teaching these racially divided project kids.
As a first time teacher, Gruwell approached her teaching assignment of the freshmen class with an open mind. She was in for a rude awakening. However, once she learned of the student’s problems and the fear and strife they lived under everyday, she developed a special curriculum to motivate these potential dropouts into becoming honor roll students.
The hook of the premise is: Gruwell never gave up on these problem kids, and she was determined to help them in their lives and their school work. Ah, but she was up against a cynical administration who had weeded out the bright kids and just warehoused the trouble makers, hoping they would quit. Gruwell believed that, with the right approach, she could make them see how their lives were connected with historical icons like Anne Frank and the Holocaust.
Gruwell worked two other part time jobs to afford to buy the kids books and take them on field trips to museums. Her dedication to the students eventually ended her marriage. Her husband just couldn’t cope with her drive and he felt neglected. Despite this setback, Gruwell persevered taking the kids to the Holocaust Museum and buying them copies of Anne Frank’s autobiography.
Each of Gruwell’s students had traumatic events happen in their lives. Many of them lost friends to drive-by shootings. Some kids had abusive parents, and some had been raped and beaten by rival gang members. So, Gruwell faced an uphill struggle to overcome her students’ troubled pasts. At every turn, Gruwell faced opposition from the administration, and only when she got her student’s grades up did she catch a break.
One of Gruwell’s problems was her status as a new teacher. This meant that she could not teach them in their junior or senior year, which by then, the students wanted her to follow them through high school. Gruwell moved heaven and earth to at least teach them for their junior year. However, she faced stiff opposition from the junior English teacher who had all the bright students. Gruwell’s charm and sincerity proved too much for the school board who made an exception to the rules and gave her the chance to teach her class in their junior and senior years.
This story underscores the adage that no child should be left behind. Of course, the secret is to motivate them to learn. When their lives are falling apart, that is a difficult task. However, Gruwell used real life examples to motivate her students. They were deeply moved by the Holocaust Museum. Then Gruwell made arrangements to get a Holocaust survivor to come to the school and talk to the kids, which was a special moment in their lives. They could identify with the Jewish struggle during WWII and were hungry for more knowledge on the subject.
Gruwell’s most significant move was to provide them notebooks in which to write their diaries. She had a locked cabinet in which they could place their notebooks if they wanted her to read them. If not, that was okay. The point was, she got them writing and thinking about their lives and how it related to what they were studying. The first step was to get the kids over their own post traumatic stress syndrome, and writing about it was healing therapy.
Writer /director, Richard LaGravenese avoided any overly sentimental scenes. He adapted his screenplay from Gruwell’s book The Freedom Writers Diary, which is a compilation of the real students writings. Gruwell’s extraordinary accomplishment led to a “Freedom Writers” movement and a new approach to teaching project kids.
The school’s administration had given up on these kids, but Gruwell saw an opportunity to make a difference and prove that these kids could learn and advance with the right teaching methods. But it took total dedication on her part and cost her marriage. Not all teachers are that dedicated.
The bottom line: The schools in these neighborhoods have got to change their curriculums to accommodate kids that come from projects, which are war zones. If they don’t, the cycle will continue with most of the high school students dropping out and ending up in jail or dead. Gruwell showed us the way to teach these kids. Now it’s up to the various schools to adopt her methods.
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