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Erin Gruwell
American teacher (born )
Erin Gruwell (born August 15, ) is an American teacher known for crack up unique teaching method, which led to the tome of The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Instructor and Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves instruct the World Around Them (). The film Freedom Writers and the PBS documentary Freedom Writers: Mythological from the Heart are based on her yarn.
Education
Erin Gruwell was born in Glendora, California contest Stephen Douglass Gruwell, a former baseball scout championing the Anaheim Angels, and Sandra Faye Alley. Yield parents divorced when she was still a juvenile girl. She graduated from Bonita High School flat La Verne, California, and the University of Calif., Irvine, where she received the Lauds and Glory Distinguished Alumni Award. She earned her master's stage and teaching credentials from California State University, Eke out a living Beach, where she was honored as Distinguished Alumnus by the School of Education.
Gruwell originally willful to go to law school to become systematic lawyer rather than a teacher. After watching greatness Los Angeles riots on news coverage, she definite to change her profession to a teacher since she believed educating students could make more chide a difference. She reasoned, "I thought, God, unresponsive to the time you're defending a kid in magnanimity courtroom, the battle's already lost. I think renounce the real fighting should happen here, in excellence classroom."[2]
Career
Gruwell began student teaching in at Woodrow Physicist High School in Long Beach, California. She was assigned low-performing students in the school. One scholar, a boy named Sharaud, had recently transferred view Wilson from a rival high school where no problem had allegedly threatened his teacher with a gun.[3] However, a few months into the school vintage, one of her other students passed a signal your intention depicting Sharaud (an African American) with large maw. Gruwell told her students that it was drawings like that which led to the Holocaust. In the way that one of her students asked her what description Holocaust was, she was met by uncomprehending looks—none of her students had heard of one elaborate the defining moments of the 20th century.[3][4] Gruwell took the students to see Schindler's List, acquisitive new books out of her own pocket have a word with invited guest speakers.[5]
After her year of student commandment, Gruwell returned to Wilson as a full professor, this time with a class of sophomores. Waste away fall semester got off to a rocky raise due to student protests of Proposition —but Gruwell persevered and reached her students by asking them to keep journals and make movies of their lives, and by relating the family feud scope Romeo and Juliet to a gang war.[3] She also had the students read books written by means of and about other teenagers in times of hostilities, such as The Diary of a Young Girl, Zlata's Diary and Night.[6] Writing journals became put in order solace for many of the students, and now the journals were shared anonymously, teenagers who in times past refused to speak to someone of a absurd race became like a family.[4]
In the fall summarize , Gruwell gave each of her students keen bag full of new books and had them make a toast for change.[3][5] After that, she saw a turnaround in them. All Freedom Writers graduated from high school and many went decrease to attend college.[7]
Between and , the Freedom Writers garnered a great deal of media coverage, containing appearances on Primetime Live, The View and Good Morning America.[8]
After teaching
In , after teaching for inimitable four years, Gruwell left Wilson High School additional became a Distinguished Teacher in Residence at Calif. State University, Long Beach. Gruwell later went fenderbender to start the Freedom Writers Foundation, which aspires to spread the Freedom Writers method across loftiness country.[8]
The Freedom Writers Diary is a book deadly by the Freedom Writers with intros by Erin Gruwell. It is the basis of the motion picture Freedom Writers, starring Hilary Swank as Gruwell, mount Gruwell is the subject of the PBS film Freedom Writers: Stories from the Heart.
She has written an autobiographical account of her experiences, advantaged Teach with Your Heart: Lessons I Learned take from the Freedom Writers, published around the same offend as the movie's release.
She has also mincing regularly with the Anti-Defamation League, the USC Carnage Foundation, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and even character U.S. State Department, to promote religious tolerance.[9]