![]() ![]() In the beginning, when my syllabus kept coming back to me in the form of a paper airplane, the students kept asking, "Why do we have to read books by dead white guys in tights?" Part of the challenge, for me, was to model great writing. I had to learn how to make things relevant to them. When I first walked into that classroom, there were 150 kids who hated writing, hated me, hated everything. ![]() What happened in real life when you tried to teach those kinds of lessons? There's a scene in the movie Freedom Writers where Hillary Swank is standing helplessly in front of a blackboard, trying to teach essay writing while the students revolt. Today, Gruwell runs the Freedom Writers Foundation, which aims to help teachers "engage, enlighten, and empower at-risk students to reach their full potential." She spoke with Atlantic senior editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz about the October magazine story "The Writing Revolution" and her conviction that personal writing still belongs in the classroom. Their poignant personal essays were later published in The Freedom Writers Diary, a book that inspired the 2007 film Freedom Writers. Frustrated by her efforts to inspire her low-achieving students, she handed out journals and asked the kids to write about their own lives. In the early 1990s, a young schoolteacher named Erin Gruwell made a radical change in her curriculum. Hillary Swank, portraying Erin Gruwell, fist-bumps with a student in Freedom Writers. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |