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Volume 6, Number 1 - Fall 2007
On the
Bookshelf
by Andee Hochman
Teach with Your Heart: Lessons I Learned from the Freedom Writers, by Erin Gruwell. New York: Broadway Books, 2007.
Erin Gruwell was a 23-year-old teacher, dewy with idealism, outfitted in pumps and pearls. Her students in Long Beach, California, wore gang tattoos and court-issued ankle bracelets; other teachers called them the “rejects.”
Books became their meeting ground. Gruwell, incensed one day when students circulated a crudely crawn caricature of an African-American classmate, assigned To Kill a Mockingbird, took the class to see Schindler’s List and talked with them about the corrosive effects of prejudice.
Gruwell worked extra jobs, using her own money to buy classroom sets of Romeo and Juliet because school supervisors insisted such books would be wasted on her students. “Shakespeare allowed me to make lessons out of language, out of love, and out of the concept of civil strife,” Gruwell writes. “Why did words change? Why did people fall in love? Why did people fight?”
Gruwell’s students not only read, but wrote: gripping first-person accounts of their lives, published in 1999 as The Freedom Writers’ Diary and later made into a feature film. This memoir offers Gruwell’s account of how her unruly, cynical, gang-tagged students became The Freedom Writers—avid readers, committed authors, engaged citizens. While her book tends to skim across prickly issues of race and class—one wishes for more depth from Gruwell’s tidy anecdotes—its message can speak to students and teachers everywhere: Believe in yourselves. Believe in each other. Believe that books can change lives.