“Freedom Writers”

Introduction

The Movie is based on a true story, directed by Richard LaGravenese, starring Hilary Swank, Patrick Dempsey, Scott Glenn, Imelda Staunton and April L. Hernandez. Erin Gruwell, a young teacher whose first assignment is a diverse group comprised of adolescents from different racial and social classes who only thing they share is that they hate each other and to survive. Despite the stubborn refusal of students to participate in class, Erin tries to interest them in different ways every day and manages to change his intolerance for communication. She leaves her blind idealism to really understand what is happening around them.

"Freedom Writers" is an MTV production based on true events that take as its starting point the book "The Freedom Writers Diary," written by secondary students in a Long Beach and edited by his literature teacher, Erin Gruwell. The story unfolds from the early 90's in the eternal context of violence and xenophobia that characterizes the country's north. 203 pupils in the classroom are part of the educational program integration and come mostly from reformatories. Erin Gruwell is the teacher who tries novel by any means, rather conventional, encourage, educate and restrain those children living in an ongoing war between gangs (Teacher, Pp. 03).

Background

The teacher gets one of the worst classes assigned. Her class does not seem impressed by her efforts to teach them but, she knows that gradually she will change the perception of them all with her unusual teaching methods. Erin Gruwell comes as a white woman from a relatively wealthy family in a classroom with young people from different ethnic origins. The school advices her not to have too high expectations of her students because both the school and the people around her believe that it is stupid to pay too much attention to the uninterested young people. Gruwell is nevertheless committed to her students to succeed. Initially, the critics seem to be right.

The students are not very interested in her English classes, often creating dissension among the classmates themselves and even some of her students getting involved, in a shooting in a shop with one fatality. If at any time, a black student is ridiculed by a caricature which he depicted with very thick lips, Gruwell talks about the Holocaust and the Nazis and that it was the same kind of caricatures used against the Jews. It humorously shows that the only white student in the class knows what the Holocaust was, and that there is more to their indifferent attitude than they want to show.

Gruwell decides to turn in a different way to teach, she then encounters a lot of resistance from the school who keeps prejudices against the students. Books are not lent to her students because they would not understand them anyway, and because they destroy the books instead of reading them. Gruwell then decide than she would self-fund the books. She buys books like the Secret and Romeo and Juliet because it would speak to them more and grab ...