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| Freedom Writers Diary Erin Gruwell |
January 2, 2017
Book 1 - Freedom Writers Diary
Part 2 - Pages 47-107
Reading Time - 1 hour (in fragments)
In this section, Erin has her students do a Read-a-Thon and includes Anne Frank's diary and a modern-day war diary by Zlata Filipovic, a Bosnia girl. Throughout the course of their reading, the students deepen their experience of the books by discussion, field trips and meeting people - Zlata, Miep Gies (she hid Anne Frank's family) as well as Holocaust survivors.
The students are struggling in their own lives, that much is clear. But in seeing how people can transform, in reading about others who have experienced the terror of war and violence, the students begin to transform. They begin to feel like real people, not labels. That is an overarching theme throughout their writings - the damage and violence that stem from intolerance. People are so quick to assign labels to others, labels that make the Other different - race, gender, skin colour, sexual orientation. At one point, an audience member (from the former Yugoslavia) asked Zlata Filipovic if she was Bosnian, Muslim or Serbian. She looked around the room and said "I am a human being".
The students begin to recognize that they don't have to accept society's labels, that they have a choice to make. Zlata encourages them that they have strength and the power with themselves. They get to choose where to direct that power. For many of the students, this is an incredibly freeing concept, one that allows them to begin to see a way out of the cage in which they live.
I recognize myself that I've picked up a lot of societal beliefs about how things are, about who different people are. I don't have to continue to live by those, however. There is incredible power in recognizing that one has the ability to choose the framework of one's life. Another book that I read recently (The Art of Possibility by Roz & Ben Zander) started off by saying that it's All Invented. The labels that we use are all invented. The stories we have about Life, about Others, about Ourselves are all invented by Us! Possibility lies on the other side of inventing something different. We get to choose what we believe.
The students are struggling in their own lives, that much is clear. But in seeing how people can transform, in reading about others who have experienced the terror of war and violence, the students begin to transform. They begin to feel like real people, not labels. That is an overarching theme throughout their writings - the damage and violence that stem from intolerance. People are so quick to assign labels to others, labels that make the Other different - race, gender, skin colour, sexual orientation. At one point, an audience member (from the former Yugoslavia) asked Zlata Filipovic if she was Bosnian, Muslim or Serbian. She looked around the room and said "I am a human being".
The students begin to recognize that they don't have to accept society's labels, that they have a choice to make. Zlata encourages them that they have strength and the power with themselves. They get to choose where to direct that power. For many of the students, this is an incredibly freeing concept, one that allows them to begin to see a way out of the cage in which they live.
I recognize myself that I've picked up a lot of societal beliefs about how things are, about who different people are. I don't have to continue to live by those, however. There is incredible power in recognizing that one has the ability to choose the framework of one's life. Another book that I read recently (The Art of Possibility by Roz & Ben Zander) started off by saying that it's All Invented. The labels that we use are all invented. The stories we have about Life, about Others, about Ourselves are all invented by Us! Possibility lies on the other side of inventing something different. We get to choose what we believe.
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