Editing Help Requested: Thinking About The Freedom Writers Movie and My Teaching Experiences

(new version)

I wanted to see this movie for three reasons - I had heard it was good, I figured it might trigger some thoughts and memories about teaching and our very own Kymlee is one of the Freedom Writers on which the book was built/based and upon which the movie was made. I spent part of Sunday reading Kymlee's articles about being a Freedom Writer, particularly her series that starts here.

Freedom Writers is a story about a teacher, Erin Gruwell, who put her butt on the line to do two difficult things at once - fight a school and school district that had the cards stacked against students it did not expect to accomplish much, due to race or past behavior problems, and truly connect with the students on a personal level. Some of the students are in rival gangs.

They learn for the first time about the Holocaust and how gangs are nothing new. In one of the movie's most powerful scenes she describes the Nazis as one of history's toughest, meanest, most powerful gangs. Later they to to the Muesum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and meet holocaust survivors. She picks up the tab for dinner and holds down two and later three jobs at once to pay for the extra expenses she incurrs while organizing such trips since she is unable to get the school or the school district to fund it.

She teaches them about the freedom riders and they adopt a variation of that term to summarize their own writings in journals which are chillingly excerpted in the movie.

The movie was powerful and inspiring. However, I also found it somewhat depressing due to my personal experience.

I worked with four mentor teachers and only the last was as inspiring and amazing as the teacher around which the true book and movie were based.

As we have been talking about in this discussion about books and English teachers, a really good inspiring English teacher is a thing of beauty, opening minds and options forever.

But an awful teacher - and there are so many (heck one of mine was so awful that she was a factor in my entering education), can rub a student wrong and turn them away, sometimes for life, away from reading and writing. No pressure, right?

While Freedom Writers focused on how much good one teacher can do it reminded me both how rare it is for teachers, in my experience, to be like that and, more importantly, that the way the education system is set up (and increasingly so due to No Child Left Behind) discourages teachers from trying new things.

It is not that teachers set out to be bad or not care about their students or give them respect or care about their thoughts, there are many teachers who want to do those things, but many of those key, dare I say crucial, things are discouraged in the present education system where the focus is on teaching a particular curriculum point on a particular day and everything is so regimented that to go off and try something different is not only discouraged but can lead to major problems for a teacher.

While student teaching I read the statistics about how the average length of a new teacher's career was about six years and, sure, I knew that was distressing but I never thought I'd be one of the ones who didn't even last that long and I sure did not expect that two of my mentor teachers, the best of them, and my first and last ones, would be leaving the profession partly because they were burnt out and partly because they they were feeling forced to do stuff like this teacher did, namely having side jobs to help pay for things for the classroom. Put simply they dared to do things their own way, which made them better teachers but caused problems with other teachers.

So how sad it is that as I watched Freedom Writers I was thinking, man, she'd never last if she kept this up! I think we were supposed to think, "Wow, how inspiring. See good teachers exist!" but I instead was thinking, "If that teacher has not retired or been forced out by now she soon will!" By the next day I realized they would never fire her because now she's famous but if other teachers not affiliated with her tried circumventing the chain of command and doing other things that made the principal look bad they'd be quickly tossed out of a job.

As with so many movies I see lately it also raised questions about what is truth? Is the movie true because it's based on a true story? Are composite characters a necessary evil? I found myself wishing the movie could be a documentary instead of a fictionalized version of events so I can know what really happened. To watch the movie one could think she only had one class when she had at least three in reality. And while the movie makes it appear as if half the students are packing heat or gangsters that is not the reality. But maybe I'm alone in that I'd rather see and hear the actual students than actors playing them.

The movie also reminded me it's time to watch the season of The Wire that takes place in the Baltimore schools. I have put off watching it for a while because what happened to me as a student teacher, what I saw and what happened to me, well, it's still fresh. While I sometimes seem to write about every possible topic there is one subject I have not written about except indirectly in pieces like this and that is because it still hurts - whether I think of it as a personal failure or rationalize it out as a circumstances beyond my control - it still hurts.

One day I will find a way to tell that story. For now I'll share it in tidbits and perspectives and reflection pieces such as this.

The movie, indirectly, made two other excellent points about the reality of education today. First, reward works better than punishment.

As one of my mentor teachers told me, these kids have been punished all their lives. If you want to get their attention and respect you don't discipline them through punishment - you reward them when they are excellent.

Second, this mentor teacher - and the teacher in the movie - subscribed to the same idea I do (and that I still rely on with the special needs adults I work with- namely set the goal above them and they will reach for it and impress you and, more importantly, themselves. Set low expectations and they will easily reach them and dislike you and themselves for the bar being set so low. If you think they don't notice this you are kidding yourself.

I practice this philosophy and soon people I work with are doing things others are saying they had no idea they could do, while I'm asking, "Why didn't they try?"

As I also a/sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/2008/08/25/1784268-dc-middle-schoolers-who-behave-can-get-100-a-month"">talk about over here, the people I work with are now doing things others had no idea they could do. I simply ask, "Why didn't they try?""

Similarly, Mrs G (as she's called in the movie) not only expects more of her students than other teachers and administrators but sometimes more than the students themslves believe they are capable of.

I ask you to try this yourself, challenge others - and yourself - to do more than might, at first, seem possible. Try talking less and listening more. Experiment with the power of suggestion (preferrably using this power for good not evil)

Most of all, though, test yourself. Try writing, for example, about your life from other perspectives,be it that of your car, your computer or your phone. Through such work you, like the students in Mrs. G's class, will learn more about yourself.

Last of all, remember, education is not something that happens just in schools. Never stop educating yourself and use that knowledge to help yourself and others.

Why? Two reasons actually: Education really is power and through these types of actions you can yourself, perhaps, become a freedom writer.

Related: Learning about the Holocuast via

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