What is the conflict in The Freedom Writers Diary?
In The Freedom Writers Diary, there are numerous conflicts. The diary entries from Erin Gruwell’s students at Woodrow Wilson High School depict manifold struggles and hardships.
Some entries deal with poverty. One addresses what it’s like to be evicted and not have anywhere to go. This diary entry, diary 24 from “Sophomore Year—Fall 1995,” also addresses shame and guilt. The student is too embarrassed to tell the other students in Room 203 about their situation. They feel bad and blame themselves. They think it’s their fault that their family lost their home, due to the expensive Christmas gifts that they requested.
Another conflict involves violence. The students have to face a fair amount of violence in their community. They must figure out how to cope with the death of friends and what to do when people they know commit violent acts.
If one had to combine the sundry conflicts...
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into one conflict, one might claim that the primary conflict is marginalization. The teens are cast aside as “unteachable.” They’re dismissed as “sure-to-drop-out kids.” The young people in Room 203 must overcome the stigma that’s unfairly fastened to them. They’re forced to prove that they’re just as capable of learning as anyone else. With Gruwell’s assistance, it’s safe to say that the Freedom Writers overcome this conflict.
What is the main problem in The Freedom Writers Diary?
The main problem in the book is a lack of tolerance. Wilson High School has a very diverse student body, but everyone is stereotyped by their race or ethnicity. Ms. Gruwell's challenge is to break down those stereotypes and to help her students see each other and themselves as worthy individuals.
Another problem is that, because of this stereotyping, students receive different educational experiences. Affluent students tend to be placed in more challenging classes, while poorer, nonwhite students are not. This is why Ms. Gruwell's class is so threatening to school's status quo: her "ghetto class" filled with "undesirables" is actually a richer educational experience than the so-called "honors" classes.
Many of the diary entries are about overcoming or confronting these stereotypes. Ms. Gruwell shows her antipathy for this behavior early on, when she uncharacteristically yells at the class for making fun of a student with big lips. But there are other examples of students making similar choices: there is the girl with poor eyesight who suffers from ridicule and who eventually stands up for herself and the girl who decides to testify in court against her gang-member boyfriend. These and many more examples show how Ms. Gruwell's students have learned that they are more than their labels.
A key skill Ms. Gruwell uses to teach tolerance is empathy. An important lesson in this regard is her unit on the Holocaust, in which the students read Night and Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl and are visited by a Holocaust survivor as well as the woman who sheltered Frank from the Nazis. These visits helped make their reading real for them.
What are three conflicts the teacher faces in the movie Freedom Writers?
In a critical essay, the writer is tasked with interpreting and evaluating the text (or movie). This falls into the persuasive writing arena because the writer must make a claim and then back it up with facts—in this case, information from the movie Freedom Writers.
Since this movie is based on the nonfiction book The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them, it is fine to pull facts from that as well, if you are using them to skillfully support your claim about the movie. For example, you could use the fact that all 150 Woodrow Wilson High School students in Erin Gruwell’s Freedom Writers group graduated, and some even went to college.
When presenting conflicts, it is usually best to start with a broad topic—for example, racism—and then use facts from the text or movie to support the topic. Lack of teaching experience could be a broad topic, as could bias. Instead of writing about the staff as the conflict, a broader approach would be to use bias as a topic, and then explain what kind of bias, and use the staff and other examples to support it.
What are the main challenges faced by students in The Freedom Writers Diary?
Among Erin Gruwell's students, the two primary challenges they face are poverty and racism. These two factors intertwine in all aspects of conditions of their community. Gruwell especially experiences these challenges in relation to the school system, but she soon realized that their neighborhood and family situations had a strong bear on their ability to learn. Gruwell's middle-class background had clouded her understanding of the conditions that limit many students, including a tightly circumscribed understanding of history and global issues.
The schools had limited resources, and the students' families did not have the means to provide supplementary funds for enrichment activities as often occurs in wealthier neighborhoods. Students with a wide range of learning styles were grouped together and labeled as problem students, causing them to be funneled into classrooms where the teachers lacked specialized training. The intersection of racism affected students' attitudes toward members of other racial and ethnic groups, increasing the antagonism and even the violence between children; those factors in turn limited their learning opportunities.