The book starts in Long Beach 1994 in a school named Wilson High School . It's freshman year and most of the students have already given up on themselves along with most other teachers in the school. They were seen as the misfits, not supposed to graduate from highschool. All they cared about was their gang, they saw themselves as a gang member before they saw themself as a human being. This book follows their favious experiences dealing with adversaries, hardships, and dealing with racism. Things weren’t supposed to change, the students were on this path and there was no sign they wanted to change until a hopeful white woman came to the school to teach them english.
Erin Gruwell saw that these kids were capable of great things, they just needed someone to believe in them. She designed her lessons to teach them about history they could relate to and gave them assignments in order to give them confidence. Throughout the book we can see how she changed these students' lives and teach them how to believe in themselves and their abilities. She made them write in a journal to capture their lives and this book is a collection of some of those entries.
I also love the writing style in this book, rather than being told by a single person the story is told by the diary entries of the students. We are able to see how the attitude and confidence of each student changes as we get further into the book. We get their in the moment, thoughts making the whole thing a little bit more personal. The diary entries allowed for us to have a deeper connection with the students and for us to really understand what struggles each of them had to go through.
This book does a great job of showing the influence teachers can have on kids, teaching has become very political and everything is based off of the curriculum. Lots of factors are going against teachers not allowing them to form the kind of teacher student relationship that we see in this book, this book just shows to me that teachers need more wiggle room to be able to show that they are people and not just their grades.
Some students give up because they believe they aren't good enough because people say they are or their grades make them feel like they are incapable and then they stop trying. But in the end the only person that can tell you you can or can’t is yourself. This is a constant theme in this book, Mrs. Gruwell met these kids when they had no hope or belief in themselves and in the end of her showing them they can they end up surpassing everyone else’s expectations.
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