Freedom Writers is about a 1st year English teacher who is working in a impoverished district and everyone has written off the students saying they can’t succeed. But she engages them and earns their trust. But it discusses topics in the community that they have to deal with. In the beginning she realized how segregated the school was in their own cultural groups. There was a very emotional scene when the teacher asks her students many personal questions like “have you lost a friend to gang violence? Do you know where you can get drugs? Have you gone to jail? “She realized how many people had lost more than 1 friend due to gang violence. Everyone actually started to think and then she gave them all a journal because she wanted them to have their own “Story.” It can be good, bad, not okay, but as long as they write in it every single day and tell your honest thoughts. She had a hard time connecting with these students, but she found her way in and wanted them to know she was a safe place.
This movie really hits the nail on the head with things we’ve learned about. You see systemic injustice, racism, othering. We have seen many real situations in the books we have read and there wasn’t much filter. We knew people’s real feelings, what they went through, how they coped, etc. This book reminded me a lot of it because there were so many differences, and these kids were struggling because they didn’t have people that really cared about them. Poverty really set them up for failure too and that is not their fault and people struggle which is totally okay. They just struggled more than others and it gave you a touch of an actual feeling of living in poverty and going to a poverty school.
