Reaching at-risk students

Erin Grewell speaks to a crowd of educators and others during a special presentation Thursday at Dorothy Garrett Coliseum. (Courtesy photo/Bill Riggs)

By BILL RIGGS
Special to the Herald
After five days of inservice, teachers are not especially happy to be told they have to pile into a building with approximately 1,500 other people to hear a speaker.

After five days of inservice, teachers are not especially happy to be told they have to pile into a building with approximately 1,500 other people to hear a speaker.  

It doesn’t help that the building in question already feels like it’s 90 degrees inside when they arrive. But, however resistant to the idea they were, they did go.

This resistance didn’t seem to faze guest speaker Erin Gruwell.

In fact, Gruwell became famous for overcoming the resistance of 150 at-risk students in her Long Beach, Calif., high school back in 1995. So famous, a 2007 movie starring Hilary Swank was based on her and her group of students called “Freedom Writers.”  

The movie’s name was the same as the Gruwell’s student group called itself while writing a “diary” of 150 anonymous stories based on their actual lives.

As Gruwell spoke to the assembled school staffs of Big Spring, Coahoma, Forsan and Stanton in the Howard College Dorothy Garrett Coliseum Thursday, she cheerfully launched into the story of how she came to work with these students and how she reacted to the experiences they were sharing with her.

Most of the students had come from rough experiences that revolved around the gangs of Long Beach, whether from watching friends and family being killed in drive-bys or surviving the gangs themselves.

“These students each had their own ‘odysseys’ or stories to tell,” Gruwell said. “It was getting these students to tell those stories, to open up, that became the real task to me.”

But it wasn’t as easy as handing out a small notebook and pen and telling the students to write. She had to find a way for the students to realize that writing was a way to truly come into their own.

She talked about how one of those opportunities arose through the “Diary of Anne Frank.” She explained how one of her students discovered that the woman who had hidden Anne Frank was still alive in 1995 and living in Holland.

“He asked that if everybody wrote a letter to her and we paid her way to America, if she would come,” Gruwell said. “I said ‘we can only try.’”

Remarkably, the woman did come to America and visit with the students and opened up a precedent which would continue through Gruwell’s working with these students.  

They had several other live “witnesses” to events they were reading about in their books, including a girl who lived through the conflict in Sarajevo.

By the time Gruwell recounted how most of the 150 students went on to graduate high school, she had several of the audience in tears of appreciation and respect. Then she surprised the audience with the same tactic that helped her students connect with their readings, she brought up someone who had lived through the experience.

Half an hour into the program, Gruwell introduced one of the original “Freedom Writers,” Maria Reyes, to the crowd.  Reyes gave the audience her viewpoint of the 1995 experiences.

She told the audience what she and the other students in Gruwell’s class had thought to expect of the “new” teacher.

“I thought Gruwell was a ‘cheerleader,’ the type who thinks just a happy positive attitude will make us want to learn,” Reyes said. “I’d seen all the movies.”

In reality, she said she felt that Gruwell would end of up failing her, just like past teachers had.

Reyes explained about her father going to prison when she was only 5, but up until the “Freedom Writers,” had been the only “teacher” she felt she learned anything from.

“He bought me a pair of shiny, red boxing gloves and told me I had to be tough,” she said. “Life would keep trying to knock me down but I would have to just get back up swinging.”

She had already related to the audience how she and her fellow “Writers” had “survived a place where I lost nearly everyone I had loved before I was five.”

But Gruwell managed to get through to Reyes and the other 149 students as she found a way to get to them with “The Diary of Anne Frank,” who the students found out as they reluctantly read was a survivor just like they were.

“(Anne) Frank’s words flushed me out,” she said. “We started to find our own ‘words’ and courage through the authors she was having us read.”

Gruwell had the students start writing in journals where Reyes found there were “no half-truths.”

“(The journal) validated who we were and where we were from,” she said.

These journals were gathered by Gruwell and were originally meant to be copied and bound as keepsakes for the original 150 students, but it was eventually sent to a publishing company and printed for distribution and became a bestseller.

The students decided to use the money from the book to found a program called “Freedom Writers’ Teachers” with the emphasis being on teachers learning how to reach at-risk students like Gruwell’s 1995 class and help them succeed.

Gruwell once again pulled out the “witness” card as she introduced two area teachers who had taken part in the program and had written their own book based on the experience called “Teaching Hope.”

After the presentation finished, Gruwell, Reyes, and the two teachers stayed and visited with audience members in the lobby and signed books.

Bill Riggs is the journalism instructor at Big Spring High School.