Erin Gruwell (right) congratulates BGSU student Eleah Brewer, a sophomore from Toledo majoring in early childhood development, on her decision to become a teacher. Following her March 23 speech to an Olscamp Hall audience, Gruwell signed copies of her and her former students’ book, Freedom Writers Diary—How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them.

President’s Lecture Series
Power of the pen changes teens’, teacher’s lives

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but is it mightier than the gun? Erin Gruwell is convinced the answer is yes, and with good reason.

The English teacher saw it happen in her Long Beach, Calif., high school classroom, where educational castoffs from often-violent backgrounds were transformed through the power of the written word.

They tell much of the story in their own words in the book, Freedom Writers’ Diary—How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. Gruwell related it March 23 to a President’s Lecture Series audience in Olscamp Hall.

Now a two-time California Teacher of the Year, she wasn’t even considering a career in education as a student at the University of California-Irvine. Planning to go to law school instead, she was “changed forever,” she said, when the verdict in the Rodney King case was announced and riots erupted in Los Angeles.

Gruwell was particularly struck by the image of a father, with a young son at his side, picking up a Molotov cocktail and throwing it through the window of a Circuit City store. They then looted the store, emerging with televisions and other items.

“Education starts at home,” said Gruwell, who knew then that she wanted to work with children like the young boy—disenfranchised and on the margins of society.

All she had to do, Gruwell thought, was get students excited about learning. But after earning her teaching credential, she soon learned what she called the “big disconnect between theory and practice.”

Reality check

Walking down the hall on her first day at Woodrow Wilson High School in 1994, she was stopped by a security officer asking what she was doing there. The 4,500-student school is “an unbelievable mix of economics, race and academic levels,” explained Gruwell, who soon realized that as the new teacher, she had inherited the 150 freshmen that no one else wanted.

They were, in many cases, just out of juvenile hall or drug rehabilitation, or from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Looking at their records, and lacking books and technology in her classroom, she wondered how she would teach them.

Shaking, Gruwell passed out the syllabus, which listed epics by Homer and Shakespearian sonnets that she had planned to use to generate the desired excitement. When a copy reached Darrius Garrett in the back of the room, however, it soon returned to her—followed by others—as a paper airplane.

What really got her attention, though, was something the 250-pound freshman said: “Why do we have to keep reading books by dead white guys in tights?”

Gruwell left that day discouraged, not getting the solace, either, that she had sought in the teachers’ lounge. There, one teacher called her students a waste, too stupid to read books anyway and not supposed to graduate.

Breakthrough

Searching for an answer, she concluded that since overcoming adversity is among the universal truths found in Homer’s writing, maybe she should listen to the “epic journeys” of her street-savvy students first.

Asking about those journeys the next day, Gruwell gained more insight from Garrett. “I feel like I live in an undeclared war,” he said. In a classroom 30 minutes from Disneyland, she wondered how that could be, but he began telling stories that made his point only too clearly.

His best friend’s mother had given her son $25 to buy things for school. Not caring about school, though, the boy bought a used handgun instead. He took Garrett with him to a park and, playing Russian roulette, “blew his brains out all over Darrius,” Gruwell said.

Even scrubbing in the shower couldn’t erase the feeling of his friend on him, added Garrett, who also had about two dozen other friends who had been killed and a father who had died of AIDS.

“The only person who was horrified was me,” Gruwell remembered. A girl in the class, Maria Reyes, chimed in that she had been to more funerals than birthday parties. By the time Maria was 5, Gruwell said, she had seen her 18-year-old cousin shot in the back five times and killed by police.

Wondering further how she was going to reach them, Gruwell started talking to her students about books written by teenagers, such as Anne Frank, who had been in real wars but picked up a pen, rather than a gun, to express themselves.

She was rebuffed again in the teacher’s lounge when she asked about books, but got a Christmas money “advance” from her father—who didn’t know her plans—and bought 150 books, including copies of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

Her next hurdle was figuring out how to get the students excited about owning a book. Thinking in terms of rites of passage, she hit upon the idea of a toast, in this case a toast simply to change.

Gruwell had thought they might read a book for the first time “if they can find themselves in the pages,” but when Maria raised her plastic champagne glass with the sparkling apple cider, what she said had nothing to do with books.

“I don’t want to be pregnant by the time I’m 15, like my mother, and I don’t want to be in jail, like my father, and I don’t want to be six feet under, like my cousin,” she said. The pronouncement opened “a floodgate of tears” among a group of teenagers previously conditioned not to let their guard down, Gruwell recalled.

The spirit of Anne Frank

They subsequently found they could also relate to the words of Anne Frank, including her acknowledgement that “I sometimes feel like a bird in a cage and just want to fly away.”

Christening themselves the Freedom Writers, after the civil rights-activist Freedom Riders, they wanted to find someone who had known Anne. Doing “a little research,” Darrius Garrett learned that Miep Gies, who had hidden the Franks, was still alive in Amsterdam.

The students thought they would simply write letters to her, and she would come to Long Beach to meet them. When Garrett asked what would happen if she didn’t, Gruwell suggested that the money they had raised could be used for more books or a field trip. She added, however, that if the 87-year-old Gies did come, “your lives will never be the same.”

And she did, prompting a welcome that might have been reserved for a celebrity. “When she walked in, it was like Michael Jordan, P.Diddy or Jennifer Lopez came to see us,” said Gruwell.

As Gies told her story of sacrifice for Anne Frank, Garrett began to cry uncontrollably. Her account of the day the Franks were captured by the Nazis reminded him of his friend in the park. And she said she continued to think of Anne every day, just as Garrett did his friend.

But when he told Gies, “I’ve never had a hero, but you’re my hero,” she reacted angrily, Gruwell said. Pounding her fist, Gies denied she was a hero. “I simply did what I had to do because it was the right thing to do,” she said, exhorting her young listeners not to let Anne die in vain.

At that point, Gruwell said, the students realized that in times of trial, they had to pick up a pen and paper instead of a fist, or a gun.

Success stories

The students’ work was published in 1999 as Freedom Writers’ Diary, which Universal is turning into a motion picture. They toured America and went to Europe to visit Anne Frank’s Amsterdam apartment, as well as the Auschwitz concentration camp and war-torn Sarajevo, where another teenager, Zlata Filipovic, had kept a published diary that also inspired them. A feature-length documentary about that journey is in the works.

More importantly, all 150 of the Freedom Writers graduated from high school and went on to college.

Gruwell, who founded the nonprofit Tolerance Education Foundation in part to fund scholarships for underprivileged students, is now Distinguished Teacher in Residence in the colleges of liberal arts and education at California State University-Long Beach.

But her hope remains that anyone in a position to make a difference in the lives of young people who feel like they don’t belong, like Darrius Garrett and his classmates, will look past the baggage to the potential, and the ability to dream.