Risya Utaviani Putri 1306370423 Teknik Kimia 2013

Freedom Writers
Freedom Writers is a good film. Its about a teacher named Ms. Erin Gruwell, an excited
school teacher who leaves the safety of her hometown, Newport Beach, to teach at Woodrow
Wilson High School in Long Beach, a formerly high achieving school which has an
integration program. Her enthusiasm is quickly challenged when she realizes that her class
are all "at-risk" students, or also known as "unteachables",not the eager students as she was
expecting. She patiently teach the students who are divided into racial groups in the
classroom. The gang fights break out and eventually most of the high school students stop
attending class.
Ms. Gruwell also has a hard time with her department head, who refuses to let her teach her
students with books in case they get damaged and lost, and instead tells her to focus on
teaching them discipline and obedience. But actually, the class cant be taught with that way.
The more they are getting banned, the more rebellious they will be.
On the other hand, one night, her two students have a problem. Eva's boyfriend kills Sindy's
boyfriend. He actually wants to kill Grant, who is frustated at losing arcade game and
demands a refund from the owner, but he misses. Eva, as a witness must be testify at court
and she intends to protect her own kind in her testimony, but finally she said that her
boyfriend is guilty.
Ms. Gruwell gradually begins to earn their trust and buys them composition books to record
their diaries. They can talk about their experiences of being abused, seeing their friends die,
and being evicted on their diaries. Ms. Gruwell also takes on two part-time jobs to pay for
more books and spends a lot more time at school. She invites several Holocaust survivors to
talk with her class about their experiences and requires the students to attend a field trip to the
Museum of Tolerance.
Students start to behave with respect and discover many new things from Ms.Gruwel. In
class, when reading The Diary of Anne Frank, Ms. Gruwell and her students invite Miep
Gies, the woman who sheltered Anne Frank from the German soldiers to talk to them. Then,
Gruwell asks her students to write their diaries in book form. She compiles the entries and
names it The Freedom Writers Diary. Her husband divorces her and Margaret, the department
chair tells her she cannot teach her kids for their junior year. She fights this decision and
convinces the superintendent to allow her to teach her kids' junior and senior year. Finally,
she can do it.
The film teaches us to appreciate the difference between each other and understand if our
friends have problems. We dont need to fight for someting useless because it only brings us
to another problem or even death. From a figure of Ms. Gruwell, we can learn that it needs a
patient to deal with our problem or something that we dont expect before, even it is worse
than we think. As long as we want to strive, we can do anything for our life.