Teach with Your Heart: Lessons I Learned from the Freedom Writers
PRAISE FOR ERIN GRUWELL“Erin is a true inspiration and an example of the extraordinary difference one person can make in the world. She continues to transform the lives of students across the country through her work and The Freedom Writers Foundation.”—Hilary Swank, Two-time Academy Award Winner“The examples of Erin Gruwell’s success as a high school English teacher in Long Beach, Calif., aren’t mounted on posterboard or bound in a notebook. They walk and talk and tell their stories of academic and personal redemption brought on by a preppy suburbanite who used pop culture to reach gang- and poverty-scarred inner city kids.”—Ed Hayward,Boston Herald“Gruwell’s students included teens who’d belonged to gangs, who’d watched friends slain by gunfire and knives, who’d been in juvenile detention, who’d performed poorly in school if they attended at all, who’d watched their mothers beaten or been abused themselves. Feeling that teachers and parents had given up on them, many had given up on themselves. [InThe Freedom Writers Diary] they wrote about living in their own undeclared war zones, about coping with their own insecurities, about their angers, their fears, their shames. And their hopes. They described sexual degradation in shocking detail. They poured out their frustrations without sparing the vulgarity. They recounted family breakups and homeless wandering and violent episodes that no child—not even a high schooler—should have to navigate. And then they graduated.” —Linda P. Campbell,Star-Telegram“There is no guile to Erin; she’s the real thing. That’s why so many of us say yes.”—Dr. Carl A. Cohn, Superintendent Long Beach Unified School District Superintendent (Ret.)