The Freedom Writers Diary (32 page)

Read on for a sneak peek at

Erin Gruwell’s memoir,

Teach with Your Heart
:

Lessons I Learned from the Freedom Writers
,

available from Broadway Books in

January, 2007.

“Why do we have to read books by dead white guys in tights?” asked Sharaud, a foul-mouthed sixteen-year-old, after he took one look at my syllabus.

Sharaud had entered my class at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, wearing a football jersey from Polytechnic High School. He must have known that donning
the
rival jersey was bound to get a rise out of the other students. He arrogantly strutted around my classroom taunting the other players, gesturing that he was going to take their places on the field, then leisurely strolled to the back of the classroom and took a seat.

As I started to discuss the curriculum, my students rocked in their seats and played percussion with their pencils. Some checked their pagers, while others reapplied their eyeliner. Some slouched, some lay their heads on their desks, and some actually took a nap. This was not the reception I was hoping for on my first day as a student teacher.

I dodged a paper airplane—made out of my syllabus, I quickly realized—and tried to make myself heard over a string of “yo’ mama” jokes.

I fidgeted with my pearls. I glanced at the polka-dot dress I was wearing—it was similar to the one that Julia Roberts had worn in
Pretty Woman
—and wondered if I had chosen the wrong profession.

Why hadn’t I gone to law school as I’d originally planned? In a courtroom, a judge would bang his gavel with gusto after the first projectile had flown across the room, and any innuendo about his mother’s integrity would bring instant charges of contempt of court. I needed a daunting authority figure in a black robe to tell these kids that they were “out of order.” I looked around the room, but an authority figure was nowhere to be found. Then came a panicked realization—I was the authority figure, armed only with a broken piece of chalk.

As a student teacher, I should have been able to rely on my supervising teacher, but he had stepped out of the classroom. When I met with him over the summer, he suggested that it would be a good idea for me to begin teaching on the first day of school, rather than easing my way into it. “If you dive right in,” he said, “you’ll establish your authority from the get-go.” From the comfort of his living room, this suggestion sounded great. I had visions of passing out my syllabus and having students stick out their hands to ask for “more,” as they did in
Oliver Twist
. In reality, the only person requesting more was my supervising teacher, who conveniently snuck out to get more coffee and never returned.

After nearly forty years of teaching, my supervising teacher planned to retire at the end of the school year. He had emotionally checked out and was now simply coasting on autopilot. I’d assumed student teachers were to be handled like timid student drivers, with someone ready to grab the wheel when changing lanes or parallel parking went awry. Since my so-called mentor wasn’t there to put on the brakes or take control, I didn’t know which direction to go, except forward.

To gain my composure, I tried to sound authoritative while reading the school’s “Guidelines for Student Behavior” to the students. I heard some snickering. I stopped reading to see what they were laughing about.

“You got chalk on your ass,” yelled a student from the back of the room.

“Daaamn, girl! Can I have some fries with that shake?” said another.

Somehow the Guidelines weren’t sticking because the class was completely out of control. Even though I had studied classroom management, it was obvious that my students were the ones managing me. I just wanted to make it to the end of the hour.

Right before the bell rang, one of my students, Melvin, leaned back in his seat and announced, “I give her five days!”

“You’re on,” said Manny.

“I’m gonna make this lady cry in front of the whole class,” Sharaud bragged as he walked out the door.

At that moment, I could hear my father’s smug “I told you so” echo in my mind. A little less foreboding than “Beware the ides of March,” but accurate nevertheless.

I felt like a failure. It was obvious that I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no idea how to engage these apathetic teenagers, who hated reading and writing, and who apparently hated me, too. To make matters worse, as a student teacher, I did not receive a salary—I actually paid for the privilege! I was holding down two part-time jobs after school and on weekends to help pay for my tuition at the university. I worked at Nordstrom’s department store as a sales clerk in the lingerie department and at a Marriott hotel as a concierge. Paying to teach in the trenches was like subjecting myself to a pie-throw at a carnival while a quarterback threw the pies. At least at the carnival, I’d see it coming.

Once the students left, I picked up the paper airplane from the floor. I circled the room collecting handouts that had been left behind and saw that several desks on the left side of the room had the letters ESL scribbled on them in black marker. In educational jargon, ESL stands for English as a Second Language. When I’d seen ESL etched on my door earlier, I’d foolishly thought some Spanish-speaker was paying homage to my classroom. I soon realized that here, ESL had nothing to do with education—it was the acronym for East Side Longos, the largest Latino gang in Long Beach.

Similar gang insignia were on other desks. These defaced desks marked my students’ territory. The Asian students tagged the desks with the name of their respective gang affiliation, as did the African Americans. My multicultural classes in college had conveniently left out the chapter on gangs and turf warfare.

In lieu of a seating chart, I naively let the students pick their own seats. What struck me now was that they chose comfort zones determined by race. This realization gave me pause. I had imagined my students filing into my class and forming a melting pot of colors as they chose their seats, but the pot must have been pretty cold, because there was absolutely no melting. The Latinos had staked out the left side, while the Asian students occupied the right. The back row was composed of all the African American students, and a couple of Caucasians sheepishly huddled together in the front.

My classroom wasn’t the only place where the students segregated themselves. It was worse out on the school quad. During lunch, they again separated themselves based on racial identity. The students had even nicknamed their distinct areas: “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Chinatown” (even though most of the students were immigrants from Cambodia), “the Ghetto,” and “South of the Border.”

The transparent segregation of the school shocked me, especially since I was expecting Wilson to be a model of integration. On paper, it was one of the most culturally diverse schools in the country, and I’d chosen to student teach there for exactly that reason. Clearly, there was a disparity between what I’d read about Wilson High and its reality.

My dad used to share stories about seeing segregation firsthand. In the early sixties, when he was drafted to play minor league baseball for the Washington Senators, some of his teammates were forced to drink out of separate fountains, eat at different sections in restaurants, and stay at separate motels whenever his team traveled through the South. As a catcher, my dad said he “judged a batter by his swing, not by the color of his skin.” So when Hank Aaron started hitting balls out of the park, my father hailed Aaron as his new hero and named his daughter Erin in honor of the legendary batter.

I was fascinated by my namesake for the way he challenged the status quo and thus helped to change the face of America’s favorite pastime. I had hoped Hammerin’ Hank’s influence would make its way out of the stadiums and into the classrooms. Disappointingly, it didn’t.

After lunch, all the kids from the “Beverly Hills 90210” section trotted to class together. Among them were students whose uniforms and matching school sweatshirts identified them as water polo players, cheerleaders, and student council members. Their classrooms had banners that read “Home of the Distinguished Scholars” and were supplied with freshly published textbooks and new computers. In contrast, my room was pretty barren. It didn’t have any banners, much less a computer. All I had to work with were hand-me-down textbooks, riddled with graffiti.

In the Distinguished Scholars classrooms, the desks were neatly lined up and Caucasian students filled most of the seats. Nestled between them may have been an occasional African American or Asian student, but it was clear that a tracking system, largely racially determined, was in place.

The few Caucasians in my class were stigmatized as outcasts by their former friends in the Distinguished Scholars program. The general assumption was that they had failed out of the program, had a learning disability, or had just returned from rehab. By the look of things, some were probably on their way back in.

There was a perception in the affluent neighborhood south of the school that the caliber of students attending Wilson had plummeted in recent years. At one point, Wilson High was considered a highly desirable public high school, but there had been noticeable white flight after the school district implemented an intradistrict busing program. By the early nineties, the Caucasian population had decreased to less than 25 percent. Some speculated that the Distinguished Scholars program was an attempt to rescue the school’s declining reputation and keep neighborhood kids from transferring out. My hope was that I could find something “distinguished” in all of my students.

At the end of my first day, the security guard popped his head into my classroom. Earlier that morning, he had stopped me in the hallway. He had a walkie-talkie in one hand and a metal-detector wand in the other. “We have zero tolerance for weapons on campus,” he warned me. Then he asked to see my ID. I handed him my student ID card from the university. “I’m a student teacher,” I stammered. “I will be teaching junior English.” “Sorry,” he said. “You look like one of the students.”

Now the security guard was saying, “There’s a police officer looking for you.”

“Why?” I asked. “Did somebody steal my car?”

“No,” he said, laughing. “He said he knows you.”

I went to the office and was surprised to see my old neighbor Mark in full police uniform.

“Mark, what are you doing here?” I asked.

“Your brother asked me to check up on you,” he said. Mark had been checking up on me since I was seven. When we were in the sixth grade, he even threatened to use his nunchakus to beat up neighbor boys who were simply flirting with me.

Mark and I had grown up in the same gated community, but I always suspected that he wanted to keep people outside of those gates as much as I wanted to bring them in. Our paths diverged after high school. I went on to college, and Mark entered the police academy. Coincidentally, we both ended up in Long Beach. It was obvious that Mark had not come to Long Beach out of moral obligation. He came to Long Beach because that’s where the action was.

“I don’t see any bullet holes, so I assume you survived your first day,” he said.

“Barely!” I blurted, laughing. “My family’s a little paranoid,” I said. “My father called me this morning and said, ‘Erin, no matter what you do, please don’t eat the apples!’ He’s convinced they’re laced with strychnine or razor blades.”

“He’s probably right!” he said, chuckling.

“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad!” I said.

“Don’t tell me it’s not that bad. I’m a cop, remember? I’m the one arresting these kids. There are parts of Long Beach that are like a war zone, especially after the Rodney King riots. There have been about a hundred gang-related murders in Long Beach already this year.”

Growing up, my only exposure to gangs had been through the media or through movies. My “hip” high school English teacher made us watch
West Side Story
to understand how the Montagues and the Capulets in
Romeo and Juliet
were like modern gangs. In that movie-musical, the “gangs,” the Jets and the Sharks, fought in choreographed rumbles and threw heads of lettuce. In real life, Jerome Robbins wasn’t choreographing Friday night fights in Long Beach, and real gangsters weren’t slinging vegetables at each other.

“I’d hate to see you get caught in the cross fire,” Mark said. “Just be careful.”

“I will,” I said, hugging him goodbye.

The security guard, who had been eavesdropping on my entire conversation, said, “He’s right, you know. Long Beach has changed a lot.”

At that moment, I just wanted to escape. I’d had enough negativity for one day, so I ducked into the teacher’s lounge to seek solace. The moment I walked in, conversation stopped. They looked me up and down and said nothing. They didn’t offer me a chair, a cup of coffee, or a word of encouragement. I looked down and noticed their open-toed Birkenstocks, earthy in contrast to my pumps. I was definitely overdressed. I must have looked like I’d just stepped out of a Talbots catalog.

Their disapproving glances brought out insecurities in me that had never surfaced before. Obviously, I hadn’t made a good first impression. Maybe it was the polka dots. Maybe it was my new Coach attaché. Or maybe it was my Tiffany pearls that pushed it over the top. Even though I craved their acceptance, it was clear that these particular teachers didn’t want me in their clique, or in their lounge, for that matter. Maybe I was too young, too preppy, or maybe they assumed I’d been born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Their uncomfortable silence made it pretty obvious that I didn’t belong.

I stood against the wall and listened to disgruntled banter about the new crop of students dubbed as rejects. Apparently my class was not the only place where things had gone awry. The teachers, many of whom had been teaching at Wilson since the good old days, were discussing how the school was going to hell in a handbasket.

“This place has gone downhill ever since
those kids
started getting bused in from the projects,” one teacher said.