Freedom Writers

"Your faces are carved onto my heart..."
~from the movie "Freedom Writers"

Wow, where is everyone?? Writers' Wednesday started off with a bang a few weeks back, but last week, only 7 comments, and this week, only 5. Hmm...I know people are still stopping by. So where are all the voices?

Anyway, that made the odds of winning the $5 Amazon gift certificate a lot better for...Ali (great name, by the way :) ) Congratulations!! Ali, email me at allieb@allieboniface.com and let me know which email address you'd like the GC sent to.

###

So yesterday, I watched the movie "Freedom Writers," starring Hilary Swank, and I highly recommend it. I expected the typical white-girl-goes-to-the-'hood-and-saves-a-bunch-of-underprivileged-kids movie, which it sort of was, but it was well acted and had a really good central message. So I enjoyed it all the same.

It's the story of Erin Gruwell, this brand new, lily white, pearl-wearing teacher who takes a job in an LA high school during the riots of the early '90s. One day, totally fed up, she's telling her students how the way they treat each other, separating by race and hating or loving each other just because of skin color, is what started the Holocaust.

And not one of her kids knows what the Holocaust is.

So the movie is really the story of how she enlightens them about that time in history (she calls the Nazi party the biggest, baddest gang in history, one that puts their own gangs to shame), but also how she shows them the power of writing down their own stories. The journals the students kept, about their own experiences, eventually turned into the book The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them, which I had read before I saw the movie. A worthwhile read as well.

Rent it, if you haven't seen it yet! (Added bonus: Patrick Dempsey, a.k.a McDreamy, plays Gruwell's husband ;) )