Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Freedom Writers
This book is sort of different from others, its a collection of diaries between former students that attended the low-perfoming school, Wilson High School, in Long Beach, California. The teacher, Erin Gruwell was a first year English teacher and she was stuck with the worst of the worst student that attended Wilson. They were freshmans in Highschool that were reading at third grade levels and also didn't couldn't care less about the cirrculum that was forced upon them. These students had no respect their teacher and they the kids thought she was another teacher that they could run out the door in a month or two, however she was different. Once the students began to see that their English teacher really did want to help them, they began to open to her and actaully enjoyed coming to her classs, many even confessed that this was their favorite class and if it wasn't for that class they probably wouldn't even bother going to school.
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This would be a cool story if it were fiction, but it's especially neat that everything is true. I wonder how these people are doing now, and if they've managed to achieve at the same level as the students who did better than them in high school. How do you think the format affects the story? Does the writer switch between perspectives in a logical order to connect the story? Or is it chronological? I wonder if the author uses all of the diaries, or just some of them. It seems like the author could alter the course of the story, by including the diary entries in a different order, or by choosing to use some of them, and not others. Does anything stand out in this regard? It seems like there are a lot of stories about under-performing kids being turned around these days. Is this story especially unique in some way, or is the fact that it's true interesting enough? Under-performing schools have been a problem for hundreds of years, but occasionally that one teacher can turn things around. That's pretty cool. Do you recommend this book?
ReplyDeleteFrom your description this book reminds me of the movie Stand and Deliver. This movie is about a math teacher in East Los Angeles who teaches at a similarly under privileged school. He sets the goal of having the kids take AP Calculus their senior year. He becomes the only reason that some of them stay in school. For your next blog post I think that you should think about adding more details about the kids and maybe some stuff about their personal lives. I think adding that would give a more personal feel to the blog post and help to draw the reader of the post into the story. Overall it seems like a very interesting story and as Henry said above the fact that it is true makes it all the better.
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