The movie, The Freedom Writers, is a true story about a first time teacher in a project school that just started to integrate colored students. The school is in Long Beach, California, 1993, and she is teaching freshmen in high school who are struggling to get through each day alive, so school obviously seemed inconvenient and pointless to them.

Her name was Erin Gruwell and she made the students realize that hate, racism, and oppression are not the ways to go if you want to make it through life. She sacrifices everything; her free time, her sanity, her marriage, just to help these kids make it through high school and into college. She takes on two extra jobs, pays for books, supplies, and field trips out of pocket, and offers tutoring late into the night. The amount of teachers in the United States today who would do the same for their students is so minuscule it can’t be represented by any fraction of a percent.

Most of these students in the Freedom Writers were the first in their families to make it all of the way through high school and into college. More often than not, nobody in their families made it past freshman year of high school. These students were able to turn their lives around. They turned away from the life of crime and violence because Mrs. Gruwell made them see how good living could be if they were willing to try and make it better.

If more teachers in our age would be willing to put forth that kind of effort and motivation, our country’s graduation and academic success rates would skyrocket. The amount of growth The United States could go through, as an after effect of this is incalculable.

Mrs. Gruwell, a first year teacher, accomplished an amazing feat in that she turned a group of crime ridden teens, into high school graduates. The possibilities are endless if more groups of kids can have same reaction to the teaching they receive. Now, this may have been a once in a lifetime chance with just that group of kids and that one teacher; but who is to stop us as a whole from trying?

Hopefully people will look at this movie and see a new motivation for teaching and not just teach so they can count the hours until the school day is over.