I wonder what it was actually like...

books:


	• The Freedom Writers Diary : How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World ... Freedom Writers, Zlata Filipovic Main Street Books, 1999 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 134 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Review of Freedom Writers Diary

The book is a great read. I would definitely recommend to teachers, especially those that teach or will teach a widely diversified class. Not just teachers should read it. You really get an idea how crazy being racist and prejudiced is and how many people can be hurt by it. Nothing was edited so you get the full feelings of what those teenagers lived through.

An inspiring story.

I loved reading the stories from the voices of the various students and hearing how they discovered love and hope despite their difficult home lives.

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I wonder what it was actually like...

There were lots of positives and negatives that stuck out to me when I read this book which really bothered me.

Let's start with the teacher. We get occasional reflections from Erin Gruwell throughout the book, and in the beginning, they provide a way for us to get to know the teacher and to experience some of the adversity and the troubles that she was experiencing with running her classroom in the unorthodox style she managed. As the book progresses, the majority of these insights begin to fade into a simple account of what she did, the awards they won, and the plans that she had. For instance, she briefly mentions that she had to struggle to teach these kids for their senior year, and then she breezes over how she got that done and launches into an explanation of the binding of their book and the two awards ceremonies that she's attending. This robs the teachers out there of a great potential resource for them to use and understand, and glosses over the reality of politics in education.

The other issue I had was with the journal entries of the students. While I'd love to believe what I'm seeing, I have a difficult time believing that these entries the children wrote were not blown a little out of proportion during the editing or completely contrived from the get-go. Before you jump all over me for having a lack of faith in these kids, look at what we're presented with: the first few journal entries, which these kids supposedly wrote on the first few days of class are every bit as long and as detailed as their later entries in their senior year...and this is supposedly when they were well below the rest of their grade and their expected reading level, and when they had no faith in their teacher whatsoever. What we are left with, then, is a look only at where they were during their junior and senior years, with no gauge of progress or results to compare.

Because of the way the book was put together (entries are numbered rather than being entered chronologically, and no students are named), there is a lack of continuity between chapters, and no characters. Thus, all we are left with are two styles of entries: 1) the entries about struggles and hardships, and 2) the hopeful entries. You are completely unable to identify the students and connect who wrote which entries unless the stories are about a single club or experience. I would much rather have seen the students be given fake names to keep their anonymity protected, because then we not only benefit from a more personal connection to the students, but we also get to see how they've grown from their struggles, and we could break up some of the monotony between struggle stories and hope stories.

Then you get the obligatory "Anne Frank [or insert speaker here] is my hero" entries that read almost exactly like essays that I used to write for the sole purpose of appeasing a teacher who clearly has a tremendous interest in the speaker or book. While the experiences these students had were much more impressive than a simple book or movie, the similarity is astonishing, and I can't help but believe that these kids felt a lot of pressure and wrote what they felt the teacher wanted to hear rather than what they actually felt.

The entries that we are presented with in this book are also extremely toned down versions of the original, which in some sense steals from the power that they can convey. As a couple of students pointed out, the editing process was a big part of putting this book together, and I'm not sure whether it was the authors themselves or the publisher, but the snippets that we are given in the diaries are about the editing process are much more honest and graphic accounts of what happened to the students than the full diaries that we are given in the pages of the book. Some were certainly removed to protect anonymity, and probably also because of their graphic nature, but I believe that readers could have benefited from a slightly more realistic tone. The PG13 edit that the majority of these accounts are given strips the events of their power.

On the whole, though, that doesn't take away from the fact that Gruwell is clearly a very gifted teacher, and that she did take these children much farther than anyone ever expected of her. The lessons in the book are timeless, in that classroom management is all about building relationships, not only amongst students, but also between the teacher and the students. It's inspirational, and impressive, but clearly a bit contrived and heavily, heavily edited. This book is a pretty good read, but I think you have to take it with a grain of salt.

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Got my daughter to read

This is an excellent book for a non reader, especially if they have seen the movie. My daughter thoroughly enjoyed the book and she is not really a reader. it has now encouraged her to move on to a Diary of Anne Frank. Thank you

A Great Read

An extra-ordinary book. I bought 3 copies to give away to friends. A very easy read and very enjoyable. Not just for educators.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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