![]() ![]() ![]() “Claire and I will spend the next 10 months writing and editing her portion of the novel,” said Key West High School English teacher Kyla Shoemaker. Their book, the “Freedom Writers Diary” was published and became a New York Times bestseller, and then a Hollywood blockbuster. All 150 of the original Freedom Writers overcame addiction, abuse, teen pregnancy and gang wars, and each of them graduated from high school in 1998 and became successful adults. The Freedom Writers program has grown from a single classroom in Long Beach, California in 1994 to a global movement and curriculum that trains teachers, provides scholarships and inspires students to engage in their surroundings and to share their stories of struggle, survival and success. The original ‘Freedom Writers Diary’ was published by California high school students in 2009 and became a bestseller and then a movie starring Hilary Swank. Gruwell also helped her students keep journals and turn their struggles into stories that eventually were published in a book called the “Freedom Writers Diary.” The students named themselves the Freedom Writers as a tribute to the Freedom Riders who practiced civil disobedience in the 1960s by riding in the front of buses and other places blacks weren’t allowed. She introduced reading material that was relevant to their lives in a racially divided, poverty-stricken area. ![]() Gruwell met her original students in 1994 after all others had given up on them. The book, to be called “Dear Freedom Writer,” will also include responses to each student’s story from an original Freedom Writer and from Gruwell, who now teaches at a California university. Her story and those of the other 49 selected students will be published as a novel by Penguin-Random House Publishing next spring. Schoonover wrote and submitted a story about overcoming dyslexia and learning to adjust her thinking so she could read and write even while her brain and eyes conspired against her and rearranged words and numbers. There's the boy whose father doesn't think his son will succeed and offers no hope or encouragement.Claire Schoonover, a Key West High School sophomore, was recently chosen as one of just 50 students worldwide to participate in this year’s Freedom Writers program. There's also the girl who had to bring herself up because her mother was tired of being a mother. Then the girl who had a really wonderful family life at one point and within a few years, the mother left, the father remarried to a woman she and her siblings couldn't adjust to soon they moved to an aunt's place who loved her a lot until her lover returned from the jail and the kids were back to square one - homeless and family-less. There's the boy whose family doesn't have a home to stay in because they are so poor. There's the girl whose parents stole her stuff so that they can fund their drug addiction. There's the student who's the sole caretaker of the family and is on the verge of eviction because he/she has to pay 800 bucks in rent and the car payment is also due. The following 300-odd pages of this book shows so well how every single student has been transformed by Erin's teaching methods, the students' life experiences, their choices and willingness to perhaps hope that maybe they'll come through it all fine. So many stories in the book are moving. Would you rather wallow in depression because you are going through a life-changing mess or would you rather change the way you respond to that mess? I like to believe that I'm the only person who can control my life - of course there's the butterfly effect and then there is the case where someone else's actions can affect what happens to you, but they are usually single events, and most times, one can always decide one's reactions to such events. The movie was everything about changing your destiny, and all through my life, I've never tolerated the 'fate' and 'destiny' philosophies that anyone dished out to me. Who doesn't love a rebel? And I mean a good rebel - someone who succeeds in something when everyone else expected him/her to fail. I didn't have too many expectations from it, but by the end of the movie, I loved it. ![]() At that point, I wasn't too keen on reading the book, but when I saw the movie pop up in my Netflix recommendations list, I decided to check it out. I first heard of this book in Sheila's blog when she reviewed this during the Banned Books week last year. Someone else said, "She'll only last a day." "These kids are going to make this lady quit the first week," my friends were saying. I'm sure one of these days she's going to go to principal and ask for her leave, but then again, what else is new? ![]()
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