This year the Happiness Committee will make the presentation of the gifts at the General Medical Staff Meeting. Please mark your calendar for this very special meeting featuring speaker Erin Gruwell from Freedom Writers Foundation.
"When I walked into my first class as a new teacher, I could not have been less prepared to deal with the harsh realities of the lives of my students or the way the outside world would crash into my classroom. These teenagers lived in a racially divided community and were already hardened by firsthand exposure to gang violence, broken homes, juvenile halls, and drugs. The obstacles these teens confronted as students became challenges for me as their teacher.
The 150 freshman who drifted into Room 203 had already been dubbed as the school's "rejects." Sure enough, that hurtful judgment was reiterated several weeks later when I was told that my students were "too stupid" to read a book from cover to cover. My students were far from stupid, but they had certainly given up on education. They felt as if they had no reason to care about school; the potential rewards of college and a career seemed remote, even alien.
After hearing, "Ms. G, this doesn't have anything to do with my life," more than once, I made it my mission to prove my students wrong by finding ways to make my lessons speak to their experiences and tap into their talents. The students brought their histories of racial conflict into the classroom.
They needed an educational philosophy that promoted tolerance and encouraged them to rethink their beliefs about themselves. I decided to assign books written by, for, and about teenagers who had lived during wars but were able to right the wrong by chronicling their own harrowing stories. To my amazement, students who had originally hated reading and writing became engrossed in reading Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl and Elie Wiesel's Night. These books and others resonated with the reality of living in a dangerous urban environment, not long after the Los Angeles riots in 1992.
When one of my students exclaimed, "I feel like I live in an undeclared war zone," I realized that these young people needed to be encouraged to pick up a pen rather than a gun. Tragically, this student had lost two dozen friends to gang violence. In an attempt to connect with my class, I gave my students journals in the hopes of giving them a voice. Before long, they began to pour out their stories openly, unburdened by the anxieties associated with spelling, grammar, and grades. Journals provided a safe place to become passionate writers communicating their own histories, their own insights. As they began to write down their thoughts and feelings, motivation blossomed. Suddenly, they had a forum for self-expression, and a place where they felt valued and validated."
