Freedom Writers

The movie Freedom Writers is one of those movies where when you watch it you say to yourself, "That's why I want to be a teacher." This movie followed a first year teacher through the first and second years of her teaching experience at an inner-city school in California that was primarily made up of "minority" students, and the movie followed her struggles with a group of students that had been labeled as trouble-makers and gang members.
One thing that really got me about this movie was the fact that the department head and the senior English teacher were so unhelpful. The fact that they wouldn't let Erin, the teacher, use any of the books really bothered me. It wasn't like anyone else was using them. The students needed to feel respected and part of that was being seen as valuable enough to have actual books. I think it was pretty amazing what Erin was willing to do to support her class. The senior English teacher really rubbed me the wrong way. When he asked the one student to give them the "black perspective" on the book The Color Purple, I was shocked. He was so clearly and outwardly racist when he talked with Erin in the teacher's lounge. As a teacher, you should be supportive of all your students, no matter what race they are from. He was so angry that the integration thing had "ruined the school" when it was probably the fault of people like him and the fact that people are not willing to look deeper than the skin a person has and were unwilling to enroll their white students with "gangsters". Anyway, more about that in my next blog.
The stories that the students told were very powerful and very moving. What they were able to experience in Erin's classroom is what I think real learning is. It shouldn't be all test scores and GPAs. Real learning can't be measured by a bubble test.
I think that this could be repeated in other classrooms in other schools, and it should be what we strive to repeat and instill that kind of learning in our students. Okay, so getting extremely famous people to come to schools might be a little different to replicate everywhere, but every teacher can work to bond her students, to make them see what they have in common, not what separates them. What the head of department said about this kind of teaching being wrong and a waste of time was very wrong. This is the kind of teaching that we dream about and hope that all of our children experience.