"Our story, our words"

Even though I've seen all the movies that were given on the list for this week, I decided to choose Freedom Writers because of the stories the students in Erin Gruwell's class told. What I did notice from the movie is how they presented difficulties in establishing and maintaining identity.

All the students were affiliated with some gang, but in ways, they thought of themselves as the gang as a whole. To me, Eva seemed like an example of this and how she would always represent her crew, or in this case, the ones that stay close with her that have the same ethnicity as her. I thought of her as someone that wasn't exactly aware of her identity, and was only able to figure out who she is after finally trusting someone, like Ms. Gruwell.

At one point during the movie, where Ms. Gruwell was talking to the assistant principal about the materials she needs for their class. The vice principal treated Ms. Gruwell's students as outsiders only because of the crimes they committed and because of their reading level. She casted them as outsiders because of that, even though she doesn't even know the students at all.

The film did present a situation where it displayed conflicts between the 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. Victoria, the honors student, did not like how the honors teacher was egging her on about "The Color Purple" novel, and how he expected to know about it because she was black. The teacher then saw Victoria as an outsider since she decided to switch over to Ms. Gruwell's class because she felt that she would be an 'insider' in her class and not feel targeted all the time.

Lastly, it's hard to describe if the film created sympathy for either group. It's hard for me to come up with a spot to place who to where. If anything though, the film did sympathize and share hope to others to people that were like Ms. Gruwell's students before they met her.