This is a powerful movie about the lives of a group of inner city youngsters who all happen to end up in Erin Gruwell’s Freshman English class. Their lives are filled with hate, anger, desolation, violence, hunger and isolation. Enter a first year, profoundly naïve, first year teacher.
What Erin Gruwell lacked in experience, she made up in heart, courage and determination. In a school where the textbooks she wanted to use like, The Diary of Anne Frank, were prohibited to her because the administration felt the books would be misused and not understood, Erin got extra jobs to pay for the books herself.
She told the truth from her experience, white and naïve, and the students told their truth. Erin listened, so did the students. She crafted assignments around their reality. They studied the Holocaust. With the monies from her extra jobs, she took them to the Holocaust Museum and to dinner at the restaurant where she worked with Holocaust survivors as their guests.
