STEPPIN' UP TO THE LINE

Polly Ann Brown

"Freedom Writers" extends the tradition of films in which a devoted, daring teacher eventually learns through a grueling process of trial and error and excruciating humiliation how to win over a classroom of students.

One glaring flaw of this latest teacher-as-hero film worked on me as no more than a minor irritant. While the movie applauds the rookie-teacher’s success at humanizing individuals by breaking down stereotypes, her colleagues are ruthlessly demonized (by the director) into silly caricatures of themselves.

Still, the movie was mostly believable. My reading-writing-teacher-self resonated with its main theme. It triggered memories and renewed my vision for what is possible in a classroom in which education is seen not as something that happens to people but as something that occurs between a teacher and students.

Before anything is possible in this story, however, the fresh-on-the-scene, starstruck teacher, Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) will need to have her idealistic fancying tempered. Dressed in fire-engine red with a strand of pearls circling her long white neck, she walks into a classroom of students qualified and eager to break her in. They eye her menacingly, hurl insults, then render her invisible and agonizingly powerless: They turn their backs, cluster in their own conversational groups, throw things, fight, get up and walk out. This well-scripted scene realistically portrays a teacher’s worst nightmare.

Based on a true story that took place in Long Beach shortly after an explosion of post-Rodney King interracial gang fights, the classroom is but one of many battlegrounds for these students. Gradually, Ms. Gruwell notices that in the classroom, in the hallways, and in the fenced-in area outside the school, students huddle in groups that break down along skin color and ethnic lines. This isn’t about choosing into or out of a particular group based on popularity or some arbitrary preference. This is territory staked out and boundaries drawn by birth and by blood. Loyalty to one’s own group—Latino, African-American, and Cambodians—isn’t a badge of honor; it’s a matter of getting through the day alive.

"But remember," says the father to his teacher-daughter in one of the most memorable lines of the film: "You are not responsible for their lives outside of school." Our brave rookie-teacher tried to fly and crashed on that one. Before the first day, she wrote up lesson plans, decided on the book, vocabulary words, and other items she would teach. She naively believed her students would learn.

But after picking up the pieces from disastrous attempts to use the top-down approach, she learned this lesson: She might not be responsible for students’ lives outside of school—dangerous alliances, gang-fighting, domestic abuse, drugs. But she had better respond to their out-of-school experiences.

Real learning begins when Ms. Gruwell factors in the brutalizing effects of violence on her students’ young lives. She shelves Homer’s Odyssey, pushes desks and chairs aside, draws a line down the middle of the room, divides people into two groups, one on each side of the line, and meets her students where they are. In the process, she begins breaking down barriers between groups.

"If you have had a friend killed, step up to the line," she says. People hesitate, then slowly move forward, shuffling to the line, tips of toes barely touching, gang-bangers from warring groups looking into each other’s eyes. This they have in common: They have lost a friend to violence. "Two friends?" she asks. Not everyone but too many. "Three friends?" A few.

"How many of you have heard of the Holocaust?" the teacher asks. The only white student in the group sheepishly raises his hand. No one else has heard of the Holocaust.

There is a way to release the talents of students who have been academically shut down by the negative, institutional baggage of low reading scores and labels and descriptors ("at risk," "not college material"). There is a way into the hearts and lives of human beings who have steeled themselves against a battering world by learning how to batter back.

"Write," Ms. Gruwell bids her students. They accept the invitation because they ache to make themselves known. The seething anger, the terror, the quiet sorrows, the private agonies brim over and spill out onto blank notebook paper.

There is a way to tear down walls and bridge social and ethnic divisions. "Read your journal entries to each other," Ms. Gruwell urges. They also read Anne Frank, a book their low reading scores suggest they will not get, yet a book they get all too well.

Then it is time for a field trip to disturb a few notions about white folks. These unfolding images—students walking, in wide-eyed silence, through a Holocaust museum, taking in the stories of Holocaust survivors and the woman who hid the Frank family—dominate the film. They most strikingly illuminate how a journey into strange, unfamiliar territory can turn into a warm homecoming.

"Freedom Writers" is a riveting and realistic enactment of Paulo Freire’s "pedagogy of hope." Get the dialogue going, bring out the truth, take students on an adventure of unveiling that will lift them out of the hellhole of their lives.

Ms. Gruwell’s students begin to lay down their weapons and turn down the offer of drugs. An African-American young man whose warring ways have kept him on the streets is welcomed back into his mother’s house. A black hand grasps a white hand in solidarity. Sacrificing family bonds and risking her life, a Latina, from a courtroom stand, speaks truth that will free the African-American defendant.

It is no wild leap to apply the film’s lessons about the possibilities for dialogue and healing in human encounters on a broader scale. Bringing justice and brokering peace in world trouble-zones, for example, begin with the invitation extended by the teacher in "Freedom Writers": Step up to the line, come to the negotiating table, make yourself known to the one who is feared, to the Other in whom, if grace is given, you will encounter God.

A family, a classroom of students, a corporate boardroom, a nation, the world, Martin Buber claimed, are built not of individuals but of living units of relation. "Freedom Writers" makes clear that justice and peace are harvested from seeds sown in those places where I and Thou meet, in the realm of the interhuman.

The kingdom of God is like the grain growing while no one watches (Mark 4:26), like the hidden leaven silently taking over the flour bin (Matt. 13:33). The late John Howard Yoder wrote that "who is in high office or what laws are written will make less difference . . . than the accumulation of an infinity of tiny deeds: mothers who feed their children, doctors who get their dosages right, policemen who hold their fire" (For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical, Eerdmans, 1997, p. 244). As "Freedom Writers" poignantly and powerfully reveals, the accumulation of deeds includes teachers whose basic impulse is to tap into their students’ longing to know and be known.

—Polly Ann Brown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a retired educator. She enjoys visits with four grown sons, their wives, six grandchildren (two on the way), attends Norristown New Life Mennonite Church and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, enjoys life at home with husband and dog, Brady, and trips away. She writes poetry and various other pieces on persons and matters deeply felt.