Famed teacher lands in Moncton
Published Saturday May 2nd, 2009
Erin Gruwell's success story as a teacher was turned into a Hollywood film; Gruwell spoke to N.B. teachers yesterday
The challenges are different, but the same lessons Erin Gruwell learned, and taught, on her way to becoming one of the world's great teachers apply in New Brunswick, Gruwell says.
Gruwell is the teacher who was the inspiration for the feature Hollywood film Freedom Writers, starring Hilary Swank, the teacher who took 150 kids that everyone had given up on, and transformed their lives, seeing each one graduate and go on to better lives, breaking the cycle of poverty, prejudice, gangs and drugs.
"I always say that a rose is a rose is a rose," Gruwell said in an interview after her address to about 5,200 New Brunswick teachers yesterday in Moncton, "and a kid is a kid is a kid. Kids just need teachers to teach to them."
Of course that's oversimplifying her own message, yet it sums up succinctly what Gruwell accomplished when she was a student teacher in 1994 in California, sent to an inner-city to teach kids that were destined from birth to fail.
But Gruwell's students didn't fail. She managed to reach out to each child and each one to open up, most for the first time in their lives. Soon they were reading, writing diaries of their lives and making films of themselves, convincing themselves not to get pregnant at age 15 like their moms, not to spend life behind bars like their dads and not to end up in cemeteries like their brothers and sisters and gangster friends.
"My hope was always that teachers can just really concentrate on the optimism that kids can change," Gruwell said. "Remember their stories, because everyone has a story, even the students."
The advice applies here in New Brunswick, she believes, because it doesn't really matter if the issues are drugs, guns and gang warfare or a lack of teaching resources, depleted budgets, high illiteracy rates and kids who come to school hungry, the lesson is the same, reach out to kids, really get to know them, show compassion and show them that if they can't change their past, they can change their future, she said.
The teachers were at the Moncton Coliseum for Learning Today -- Teaching Tomorrow professional development conference, featuring a host of guest speakers and professional development sessions for teachers from English-language schools across the province.
"There are presenters here specializing in motivation, assessment, literacy, home work and assisting struggling readers," Brent Shaw, president of the New Brunswick Teachers' Association, said.
Gruwell was perhaps the one who changed the most during her tenure in Room 203 at Wilson High School, where unteachable students were sent. She decided to channel her classroom experiences toward a broader cause, and today she tours North America, speaking to large corporations, government institutions and community associations about how to change troubled teens' attitudes from guarded cynicism to unabashed hopefulness.
Whether that means a big-city teenage gang member whose teen years have been marked more funerals of murder victims than birthday parties, or being an influence in the life of a child whose parents can't read, who rarely gets enough to eat at home and who has been called stupid all their life, to Gruwell, the teacher is often the only one who can effect the kind of change that will transform a life and even generations of lives.
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