Movie Review (05-04-09)

This week marks another first for this little column of mine: I am going to write a movie review. Of course, it won’t be a typical review. Rather, it will be a “how this movie reinforces my perspective about education” review. Go figure.

This weekend my wife and I watched Freedom Writers. The move depicts the story of teacher Erin Gruwell and her remarkable success with a group of struggling inner city students. The movie is based on the book The Freedom Writers Diary, written by both Ms. Gruwell and her students describing not only how this amazing teacher reached a group of “unreachable” students, but also chronicling the hard lives of a group of kids trying to survive the gang wars of Long Beach, California.

The film begins with Erin taking her first teaching job in a large public high school that recently underwent “integration”, meaning that hundreds of low-income minority students are now bussed to this once “A-list” school. The older staff are understandably bitter about the transformation, as the new students are violent, disrespectful, and generally have run off the school’s best academic achievers.

While Erin is excited to face challenges of integration, she quickly realizes that she is completely unprepared to teach the freshmen students assigned to her, most of whom belong in one gang or another, and many of whom wear court-ordered ankle bracelets, having chosen education over jail.

She finally reaches the students when she abandons the traditional curriculum and begins to find meaningful lessons to which the students can relate. She begins by teaching about the holocaust, as most of her students know what it is like to be shot at, be discriminated against because of their ethnicity, and have experience watching family members be forcibly removed from their homes by the police.

Erin finds no support within her school, so she works three jobs during evenings and weekends to earn extra money to buy the kids reading books and to fund field trips. The most powerful thing, though, that Ms. Gruwell does, is give each student a journal, in which they can write anything they want. She only reads them with permission and in the strictest confidence. The writing liberates the students of their terrible experiences, and they share with their teacher their real stories of violence, poverty, and despair.

Eventually, her class assemble the stories into a book, which earns them international acclaim and attention.

After the last frame, there is a postscript describing how Ms. Gruwell resigned as a high school teacher upon the graduation of “her kids” and that she took a job at a local college in order to further follow many of her students who continued their education there.

I found the postscript to be very important. You see, this is not a story about systemic change. This is not a story about making public education better for all kids. It is not even about the rise of a school from failure to success.

Freedom Writer’s is about the relationship one teacher builds with one set of students, a relationship so deep that when the kids graduate, the teacher quits in order to remain in their lives.

In my perspective, positive relationships between educators and their students is the bedrock of successful education. Whether you’re teaching in the inner city, or in a small country school, students must believe that they are loved, respected, and that they are safe under the guidance of their teacher.

While the main emphasis in both the book and the movie is on the students’ writing, and on the freedom the students gained through their writing, to me the real freedom came from the positive bond between child and adult. Psychological research tells us that everyone needs to belong to something. The students had turned to gangs to gain a sense of belonging. Yet one dedicated and talented teacher provided the students with a new identity, and a new way to view the world. By building strong, positive relationships, the teacher gave her students the greatest freedom of all - the freedom to learn.

I warned you that this wouldn’t be usual movie review. However, I will end by saying that I give Freedom Writers five stars and two big thumbs up!