![]() ![]() There's the boy whose father doesn't think his son will succeed and offers no hope or encouragement. There's also the girl who had to bring herself up because her mother was tired of being a mother. Then the girl who had a really wonderful family life at one point and within a few years, the mother left, the father remarried to a woman she and her siblings couldn't adjust to soon they moved to an aunt's place who loved her a lot until her lover returned from the jail and the kids were back to square one - homeless and family-less. There's the boy whose family doesn't have a home to stay in because they are so poor. There's the girl whose parents stole her stuff so that they can fund their drug addiction. There's the student who's the sole caretaker of the family and is on the verge of eviction because he/she has to pay 800 bucks in rent and the car payment is also due. The following 300-odd pages of this book shows so well how every single student has been transformed by Erin's teaching methods, the students' life experiences, their choices and willingness to perhaps hope that maybe they'll come through it all fine. So many stories in the book are moving. Would you rather wallow in depression because you are going through a life-changing mess or would you rather change the way you respond to that mess? I like to believe that I'm the only person who can control my life - of course there's the butterfly effect and then there is the case where someone else's actions can affect what happens to you, but they are usually single events, and most times, one can always decide one's reactions to such events. The movie was everything about changing your destiny, and all through my life, I've never tolerated the 'fate' and 'destiny' philosophies that anyone dished out to me. Who doesn't love a rebel? And I mean a good rebel - someone who succeeds in something when everyone else expected him/her to fail. ![]() I didn't have too many expectations from it, but by the end of the movie, I loved it. At that point, I wasn't too keen on reading the book, but when I saw the movie pop up in my Netflix recommendations list, I decided to check it out. I first heard of this book in Sheila's blog when she reviewed this during the Banned Books week last year. Someone else said, "She'll only last a day." "These kids are going to make this lady quit the first week," my friends were saying. *This book may have remainder mark.I'm sure one of these days she's going to go to principal and ask for her leave, but then again, what else is new? The authors' proceeds from this book will be donated to The Tolerance Education Foundation, an organization set up to pay for the Freedom Writers' college tuition. Erin Gruwell is now a visiting professor at California State University, Long Beach, where some of her students are Freedom Writers. With powerful entries from the students' own diaries and a narrative text by Erin Gruwell, The Freedom Writers Diary is an uplifting, unforgettable example of how hard work, courage, and the spirit of determination changed the lives of a teacher and her students. ![]() All 150 Freedom Writers have graduated from high school and are now attending college. Secretary of Education Richard Riley-and educationally. They learned to see the parallels in these books to their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries and dubbing themselves the "Freedom Writers" in homage to the civil rights activists "The Freedom Riders." With funds raised by a "Read-a-thon for Tolerance," they arranged for Miep Gies, the courageous Dutch woman who sheltered the Frank family, to visit them in California, where she declared that Erin Gruwell's students were "the real heroes." Their efforts have paid off spectacularly, both in terms of recognition-appearances on "Prime Time Live" and "All Things Considered," coverage in People magazine, a meeting with U.S. So she and her students, using the treasured books Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo as their guides, undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust-only to be met by uncomprehending looks. As an idealistic twenty-three-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long beach, California, Erin Gruwell confronted a room of "unteachable, at-risk" students. Writers Diary by Erin Gruwell 2.) Secondary data sources from journals and articles obtained from the internet. Straight from the front line of urban America, the inspiring story of one fiercely determined teacher and her remarkable students. Primary data sources from the novel Freedom. ![]()
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