WATSONVILLE — In the next few years, even as soon as three months, students at Moreland Notre Dame School will be undergoing a major transition: They will be starting high school.
As the school year comes to a close, this is a thought that undoubtedly has been weighing on a lot of students’ minds as they prepare to take that next big step. While it might be scary for them to venture into that great unknown and start making decisions that will impact the rest of their lives, they received reassurance Wednesday from an author, advocate and former teacher who knows all about making positive changes in lives: Erin Gruwell.
A former teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, Gruwell began teaching a class of freshmen 30 years ago who were unable to read or write and were experiencing racial tensions amid the Rodney King verdict and ensuing riots in Los Angeles. Through a series of educational activities that included expressing their feelings through journal entries, all 150 of her students graduated in 1998, and their journals became the basis of the best-selling book “The Freedom Writers Diary,” which in turn inspired the 2007 movie “Freedom Writers” starring Hilary Swank.
Gruwell told the Sentinel that Notre Dame eighth grader Adelyn Amezcua, who had seen the movie and read the book, reached out about having her present to her eighth-grade class. This eventually resulted in an assembly in the gym with all students in fifth through eighth grade as well as staff of Martinelli’s providing sparkling cider and glasses for students to gather in a large circle and provide a toast as a recreation of Gruwell’s final class activity in her first year.
“We stood in a circle, and my students had to — for lack of a better term — actualize or even manifest ways in which they wanted to change,” she said. “The activity of doing it in front of their classmates and me, we were hopeful that it would actually come to fruition, and it did.”
The involvement of Martinelli’s was great symbolism, Gruwell said, as that was the same beverage she had used with her students back in 1995.
“We’ve traveled to all 50 states and about two dozen countries, and everywhere we have gone, we do a toast for change and we use Martinelli’s as part of that symbolism,” she said.
While the toast was geared toward feting incoming high schoolers, Gruwell said the assembly would be inspiring to all grade levels.
“We were thinking it would be both a celebration of the eighth graders but also very aspirational for the other students,” she said.
Prior to Gruwell’s speech, Martinelli’s president and CEO Gun Ruder also spoke about being in middle school and being the author of his life. He likened it to paddling a canoe on a river, including going from wanting to be a starting linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers to going to college to study medicine to changing his major to history to graduating to living overseas to managing a company in Japan to deciding to study business to climbing through the ranks at Martinelli’s.
“All of that came by just starting to paddle and choose the right way on course,” he said.
Gruwell said she wanted to be a lawyer when she was in high school and even planned to go to law school, but that changed in April 1992 when four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the 1991 beating of King, a Black man, during an arrest. The verdict resulted in rioting, arson, vandalism, looting, shootouts and increased racial strife and gang violence throughout Los Angeles.
“Something happened in the middle schools in the city in which I would teach,” she said. “Young kids, who had lost friends and fathers and nephews and neighbors, young kids who walked through a really difficult city with a horrible gang violence, feeling like they had a bullseye on their chest, picked up a Molotov cocktail, picked up a gun and they started fighting: fighting the world, fighting the system, fighting their friends, fighting their community, and it was chaos.”
As Gruwell watched this unfold on her TV, she decided she did not want to be a lawyer anymore.
“I thought, I don’t want to walk into a courtroom and stand in front of some judge and some jury,” she said. “By that point, it’s way too late.”
Gruwell instead opted to become a teacher and make changes in young people’s lives in the classroom. In 1994, she began teaching at Wilson High and was assigned to students described as “unteachable.” These were students with low reading and writing skills, came from low-income households, had been involved in gang activity and even lost friends or family to gang violence.
“The young people that were in my classroom, they didn’t even know how to get on a boat and paddle,” she said. “They felt that they were sinking.”
A pivotal moment in Gruwell’s teaching came when she intercepted a drawing that was passed around class depicting a racist caricature of a Black student. She likened it to the type of propaganda used by Nazis in the Holocaust, and when not one of her students expressed familiarity with the Holocaust, she ditched her lesson plans to make tolerance the core of her curriculum. She assigned “The Diary of Anne Frank,” took students to see “Schindler’s List,” took them on a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance and even brought in Miep Gies — who helped Frank and her family hide from the Nazis — as a guest speaker.
Gruwell also encouraged her students to write by composing journals. Her students became known as Freedom Writers in reference to the Freedom Riders who rode interstate buses to the South to protest segregation of buses in the ’60s, and their entries were compiled in “The Freedom Writers Diary.”
“Those same kids who hated reading and hated writing, they’re like accidental authors,” she said. “Those same kids who walked through the streets ditching and dodging those bullets, they’re authors and they’re activists. They’re hometown heroes.”
When “The Freedom Writers Diary” was first published in 1999, Gruwell expected only she and her students and their families would read it, but it ended up becoming a New York Times Best Seller.
“Who would have thunk?” she said. “Every single one of my kids who wasn’t supposed to make it past ninth grade graduated. Every single one of those kids that was supposed to be six feet under or in a jail cell by the time they were 18 went off to college.”
Through her nonprofit Freedom Writers Foundation, which aims to share her stories and educational approaches throughout the world, Gruwell has kept in touch with her former students, and many of them have started families of their own and work as teachers, nurses, architects, writers and other professions. The 20th anniversary edition of “The Freedom Writers Diary” includes new journal entries from her students on what their lives are like now.
Gruwell said she hoped the assembly would inspire students to think about their goals in life and be prepared for whatever gets thrown their way.
“That’s what we want you to do today is to think about ‘Where do I want to be?'” she said. “‘What goal do I want to beat?'”
Following Gruwell’s speech, students formed a large circle around the gym and were given special Martinelli’s cups filled with cider as students and parents volunteered to raise toasts to their classmates, school and siblings, some of whom were in attendance and returned the toasts to them.
“It’s my first year here, and you guys made me feel really welcome,” sixth grader Noe Fabian said in his toast to the school. “I’m really happy to be here, so thank you.”
