When will the labeling stop so we can be human beings again?
An excellent book. Period.For my summer education course, we have been assigned to read this remarkable book about a new teacher who walks into an urban school to teach Literature to students who are dubbed as "below average," "problem kids" who "will never make it" - they were the school rejects, the disciplinary transfers in rehab or on probation. Many of them were involved in gangs or had just accepted the way life (and death) was. "To some of these kids, death [seemed] more real than a diploma" (49). Ms. Gruwell almost didn't make it due to harassment from fellow teachers but then realized that if she walked out on these kids, she would just be sending them the same message that all the other teachers had sent them: there is no hope for you to be anything other than what you are, so why try?
This book is not a traditional "book," but is a compilation of real diary entries from the teacher and the students throughout their four years together in high school. It blew me away and greatly saddened me to read about the experiences, the anger and the stereotypes that were so inherent to who these kids were...the students' feelings and partial admittance that territorial gangs were stupid, and yet still believing that that's just the way things are and will always be.
Within her first semester, Ms. Gruwell intercepted a note with a racially stereotyped sketch of one of her students with cartoon lips - she yelled at the class telling them that this type of thing led to the Holocaust. None of her students had ever hear of the Holocaust. Soon, Gruwell assigned books such as Night by Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, and Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo by Zlata Filipovic to help students begin to connect the war experiences of these real life young people with their own "war" experiences with the L.A. street gangs. The students even had the opportunity to meet Zlata in person and talk with Holocaust survivors. The similarities between their stories (i.e. never feeling safe and losing friends because you look different, etc) amazed the students and they began to realize that it was up to them to do something about the injustice they knew so well rather than just accept it for what it was. Read more here.
I can't tell you how much this book has opened my eyes as both an aspiring teacher as well as a U.S. citizen. Supposedly racial stereotypes were eradicated years ago and we don't deal with them any more. How wrong can we be? How much more ignorant can we be? And how is it that these thoughts are allowed to infect the minds of innocent young kids, preventing them of thinking about other people as human beings, rather than "that Mexican" or "that Asian"? Whether we like to admit it or not, all of us struggle to some extent with stereotyping people different than us - it is sad that "we spend so much time trying to figure out what race a person is when we could just get to know them as individuals" (93). Ignorance feeds injustice. It is ignorance that leads us to making assumptions about a group of people based on the actions of one and it is ignorance that keeps us restricted to segregated "lables" rather than enjoying living together as human beings.
Make time to read this book. You won't regret it.
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"Don't let the actions of a few determine the way you feel about an entire group. Remember, not all Germans were Nazis."
~Holocaust survivor, Renee Firestone~
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on Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 12:27 PM.
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