As I said before, things were extremely crazy during our final year in high school. Not only did the Freedom Writers go to New York (many of us who had taken our first trip on a plane or out of California only a few months before) we mentored students, and worked to promote the message of tolerance by speaking to educators, business people and politicians alike.
You see, something magical happened as we went through the process of editing our diaries. Each day we read an anonymous story we knew could have been written by anyone in Gruwell's five classes, and realized that the stories were everyone's. We learned to shed our apathy as we read and critiqued the stories of pain, struggle and occasional joy of our classmates.
Before going through the experience of collectively writing and editing our diaries, most of us felt alone in our struggle. The process was cathartic and we eventually built bonds that to this day will never be broken. We learned that though we may come from different countries, neighborhoods, religious and economic backgrounds, we were more alike than we were different.
Graduation rolled around and the Freedom Writers were determined to continue pursuing, what for many of us were new goals. Off to college and scattered across the country, it became harder to pull everyone together. During the last phases of editing our book, a
small group hauled up in a hotel room with Gruwell, uncertain what the future held but knowing something great was on the horizon.
You see, something magical happened as we went through the process of editing our diaries. Each day we read an anonymous story we knew could have been written by anyone in Gruwell's five classes, and realized that the stories were everyone's. We learned to shed our apathy as we read and critiqued the stories of pain, struggle and occasional joy of our classmates.
Before going through the experience of collectively writing and editing our diaries, most of us felt alone in our struggle. The process was cathartic and we eventually built bonds that to this day will never be broken. We learned that though we may come from different countries, neighborhoods, religious and economic backgrounds, we were more alike than we were different.
Graduation rolled around and the Freedom Writers were determined to continue pursuing, what for many of us were new goals. Off to college and scattered across the country, it became harder to pull everyone together. During the last phases of editing our book, a
small group hauled up in a hotel room with Gruwell, uncertain what the future held but knowing something great was on the horizon.
