Famous teacher Erin Gruwell speaks in Worcester

In the grand ballroom of Tuckerman Hall on November 6, 2008, hundreds of people rose to their feet applauding and cheering wildly for guest speaker Erin Gruwell. Gruwell, who is famously known as the teacher portrayed by actress Hilary Swank in the movie Freedom Writers, stood in front of the room with her hand over her heart and mouthed "Thank you" to the crowd of supporters. Gruwell was invited to speak at Tuckerman Hall in support of the night's theme that every person can make a difference. Gruwell shared her experience of becoming a teacher and transforming the lives of her students, who are now known as The Freedom Writers, by helping them see that their dreams and aspirations really mean something and are in close reach.

In 1993 at the young age of 23, after pursuing a degree as a lawyer, Gruwell decided that she wanted something different for her life. She got a job at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California as an English teacher of 150 inner-city students.

"I had the lowest 150 students, the ones that nobody wanted," said Gruwell. I got the kids who just got out of Juvenile Hall, the kids who just got out of rehab for crystal meth or crack cocaine, the kids who had learning disabilities, diagnosed or not."

Gruwell had students in her class that had dealt with losing a parent, losing friends due to gang violence, and one student who sat in the back of the classroom with an ankle monitor around her foot and her parole officer standing ten feet behind her. Her students had no motivation to do well in school, no desire to learn, no hope for the future and nobody who was pushing them to do better. Gruwell thought, "How am I supposed to help them change?"

In her speech, Gruwell focused on two students who truly stood out to her from the group of 150. Darius and Maria were two students who grew up in terrible family situations and experienced tragedies that no 14-year-old should ever have to experience.

Darius was an African-American student in Gruwell's class who lost his father to AIDS and at the age of 14, had already buried two dozen of his friends due to gang violence. With all of these tragedies behind him at such a young age, Gruwell saw that his focus in life was to stay alive and not so much on reading and writing. He didn't care about school or what he was supposed to be learning; his main focus was to keep his life. Gruwell said, "He made it very clear that English class was not the solution to his problems."

Maria was another one of Gruwell's students who encountered hardships. With her father in a county jail eight hours away from her home, and a mother who had three kids all by the time she was 20-years-old, Maria dropped out of school at the age of five thinking she could make more money on the streets than any job she could get from going to school. Maria had been in and out of Juvenile hall multiple times before she turned 13, and it was this student in Gruwell's class that sat in the back of her classroom with the ankle monitor and the parole officer by her side.

Gruwell knew it was time for a change. One day, she moved all of the chairs and desks to the outside of the classroom and set up a large table upon which she placed 150 plastic champagne glasses filled with sparkling cider. Her idea was that each student would take a glass and make a "Toast for Change." She wanted to give her students as well as herself an opportunity to pledge that they were going to change their lives for the better starting at that moment.

"I saw it as starting today, we're going to toast to change. We're going to wipe the slate clean," Gruwell said.

Knowing that she was going to help her students change their lives, Gruwell went to the Chairperson of the English Department asking for money so she could buy her students books. When she was told she would get no money because her students were "too stupid and would never read a book from cover to cover" Gruwell took matters into her own hands.

"I ordered 150 copies of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and 150 copies of Night by Elie Wiesel. I thought, 'I'm going to be paying these books off like student loans for the next five years!'"

Her students' first reactions to these books were laughs, knowing they were not going to read them, but Maria wanted to prove to Gruwell that these books didn't mean anything to them, so she went home that night and began reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It wasn't until Maria came storming into the classroom one day, throwing the book at the wall that Gruwell realized she had made a difference in Maria's life.

"Maria came storming into the room yelling at me. 'Ms. G. why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell me Anne Frank didn't make it in the end?' It was at that moment it hit me. She finished the book."

A few days later Gruwell recalls Darius coming into her classroom with several books about the Holocaust and World War II eager to actually read and learn from them.

Maria and Darius' accomplishments made Gruwell think. She decided to give each of her students a journal where they would write about their life experiences and tragedies.

Gruwell said, "Each one of my students has some kind of Odyssey, some kind of journey," and she encouraged each of them to write about their journeys in their journals. These journals that the students poured their hearts and souls into were put together and published in 1999 to become a New York Times' best seller, The Freedom Writers Diary.

Gruwell picked up three jobs in addition to teaching in order to pay for her students to have journals and other books to read. She took on a job as a concierge at a local hotel, a salesclerk at a lingerie store, and a night school professor. She was working for her students, and her whole life went to making these students' lives all that they could be, and she succeeded.