In the movie Freedom Writers by Richard LaGravenese, Erin Gruwell, an enthusiastic young teacher, starts at Woodrow Wilson Classical High School in 1994. Her enthusiasm is challenged when she finds her students self-segregate into racial groups within the classroom. This segregation causes problems, as gang fights break out and, consequently, most of her students stop attending class. Not only is Gruwell challenged with gaining her students’ trust on personal and academic levels, but she must do so with very little support from her professional peers and district higher-ups. She even takes on two part-time jobs in order to pay for more books and spends a lot more time at school. Also, Gruwell shows her desires to understand them. Gruwell begins to earn their trust and buys them composition books to record their diaries, in which they talk about their experiences of being abused, seeing their friends die, and being evicted. At the end of the movie, the self-segregation is broken and they get along well each other. What’s more, Gruwell successfully prepared many high school students to graduate from high school and attend college. Human can be cruel and cold. But sometimes people become indifferent to others because they have tragic experiences, so they use indifference to defend themselves. The movie shows that love and sincerity can move others and help them move on to better things although they have suffered hardship.
