The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them

Ms. Gruwell is just about to start her first official year as an English teacher at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California. Though the school is in a safe neighborhood, Ms. Gruwell says that violence and racial tension have been increasing since the Rodney King Riots in 1992, when the beating of an African American man by the police set off a firestorm of riots and looting. The student body has changed in recent years and is now more African American, Latino, and Asian than white, though Ms. Gruwell writes that it is still diverse: “Rich kids from the shore sit next to poor kids from the projects…there’s every race, religion, and culture within the confines of the quad” (2).

Ms. Gruwell recalls her time as a student teacher at Wilson the previous year. She admits to being “naïve.” She wanted “to see past color and culture” but found herself facing students like Sharaud, whose “sole purpose was to make his ‘preppy’ student teacher cry” (2). All of this changed one day, when Ms. Gruwell found a racial caricature one of her students had drawn of Sharaud. When she compares this drawing to the propaganda the Nazis used during the Holocaust, she quickly realizes her students were unfamiliar with the Holocaust. She rewrites all her lesson plans to focus on tolerance and better connect with her students.

At one point, she takes them to see Schindler’s List at a theater with a predominately white, upper-class audience, and audience members react in fear. The incident gained media attention, and she started getting death threats. Her school department head, leery of Gruwell’s upstart attitude and worried about negative publicity, assigned her to teach “at- risk” freshman this year rather than continuing with Sharaud’s class. Gruwell remains convinced that “if Sharaud could change, then anyone can,” and prepares herself for a “roomful of Sharauds” (5). 

The students in Ms. Gruwell’s class are almost all African American, Latino, or Asian, and at first they are suspicious of their white, suit-wearing teacher. One student writes, “She probably drives a new car, lives in a three-story house, and owns like five hundred pairs of shoes” (6). They bet that she will quit within the first week or month. The class’s one white student writes that the school is “asking for trouble” by putting a class of “troubled kids who are bused in from bad neighborhoods” together and wishes he was across the hall with the other white students in the “Distinguished Scholars” class (8). 

Race dominates the way students interact with one another both in and out of school. As one student writes, “Schools are just like the city and the city is just like prison. All of them are divided into separate sections, depending on race” (9-10). Students regularly encounter race-based violence at school and on the streets, as well as domestic violence at home. Some students feel they have no alternative but to become violent themselves in self-defense. Getting a gun is easy—“like getting bubble gum from the corner liquor store”—and students don’t worry about getting caught with them at school (12).

Students deal not just with violence to themselves, but to their loved ones. One student’s friend is shot in front of him while he is buying candy at a liquor store. Another student, a gang member, writes that the death and imprisonment of his friends is worth it to defend the gang: “To the soldiers and me it’s all worth it. Risking life, dodging or taking bullets, and pulling triggers. It’s all worth it” (17).

The violence that the students regularly encounter makes it difficult for them to concentrate at school. “I really don’t know how I made it through the rest of the school day; hell, I don’t even know how I made it to my next class. I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t walk straight,” writes one student after he’s pulled into a fight (11-12). But Ms. Gruwell beings to wins over the students’ initial skepticism with teaching methods and material that they find relatable. When California Proposition 187, the proposition to remove public benefits for illegal immigrants, is up for a vote, she has the students write about how they would be affected if the proposition passed. “Ms. Gruwell’s class was where I could express my feelings about how this event was affecting me,” writes one student. “Discussing the situation in class helped” (22).

Toward the end of the term, the students read Durango Street, a book about an African American teenager from the projects who has recently been released from a juvenile work camp after stealing cars. The students see themselves in the characters in the book and are excited by Ms. Gruwell’s assignment of making their own movie version. Students outside the class begin to envy the fun Ms. Gruwell’s students are having, and the students start to find greater meaning and connection through literature. “Not only did this movie give us a better understanding of Durango Street, we also learned a lot about one another,” writes one student. “We began to understand the true meaning of not judging a book by its cover” (27). 

Ms. Gruwell is sometimes frustrated by her students’ behavior. But she is more frustrated by a system that labels them as “bonehead,” “remedial,” and “basic.” She writes: “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you tell kids they’re stupid—directly or indirectly—sooner or later they start to believe it” (30).

Ms. Gruwell refuses to give up on her students and begins to think up additional ways she might engage and reward the class. John Tu, a wealthy businessman, heard about what happened when she took Sharaud’s class to the theater last year and offers to help her take the class on a field trip.

She plans to create lessons that build on what the students already know—their knowledge of pop culture and their real-life experiences. She is teaching Shakespeare this term, and vows to “make the Montagues and the Capulets into a modern-day posse” (32). 

The students begin the term by reading Romeo and Juliet. Ms. Gruwell compares the Capulets to a Latino gang and the Montagues to an Asian gang and gains the respect of more students. “I didn’t think she knew about all the shit that happened up in Long Beach. I just thought she left school and drove home to her perfect life,” writes one student (33). When a student complains that the feud between the Montagues and Capulets is stupid, she turns the question back to them, asking if they think it is stupid that the Asian and Latino gangs fight, prompting a student to realize that they don’t even remember why they are rivals.

The students are starting to be more accepting of people who are different than them and turn away from violence as a solution. When the class plays the “Peanut Game,” the students learn that “a peanut is still a peanut even if the shell is different” and not to “judge a peanut by its shell” (38). After the Oklahoma City Bombing occurs, Ms. Gruwell has the class write a report, and they realize that they are all susceptible to violence, but that “fights don’t solve matters, they just make things worse” (39). 

The class takes a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance for a private screening of the movie Higher Learning. One Asian student relates to the story of Mas Okui, a Japanese American who was forced into an internment camp after Pearl Harbor, just as he was forced to live in a camp during the war in Cambodia. Later, Mas Okui is part of a diversity speaker panel that Ms. Gruwell arranges. Another student was inspired by the story of panelist and concentration camp survivor Renne Firestone. She writes, “By meeting these people, it made the books we’ve been reading more meaningful. It also made me realize that anything is possible” (43). Another student is excited to talk to John Tu, their wealthy benefactor, and have dinner at a nice hotel.

The final entry for the year is from a student who has been skipping school, sure that no one noticed. When Ms. Gruwell pulls her aside at the end of the year and tells the student that she believes in her, it is something the student has never heard from a teacher before. “I hate to admit it, but I’m actually starting to like school. I can’t wait till next year to have Ms. Gruwell all over again. You never know what exciting things will happen” (46).