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The Freedom Writers Diary By Erin Gruwell

Decent Essays

While I was firstly reading “The Freedom Writers’ Diary,” by Erin Gruwell, I was expecting the book to be tedious and humdrum. The story is set to happen in a classroom – Room 203 – at Wilson High School, located in California; and as we all know, high school is a place where we learn and communicate on a daily basis. However, I was given a total shock and impressed after I fully comprehend the context of this book. The book is formatted as a collection of diaries, written by different students from the same “self-segregated class.” Listening to Ms. Gruwell’s suggestion, all students record their struggles, joys, and daily experience in their diaries.

When I was reading the book, one question kept revolving in my mind: I eagerly …show more content…

What is one of the themes of this book? I guess the writer tries to point out many existing stereotypes in life. While I was reading the book, I tried to find out some of them. On page 254, the quote “on my way… me” discrimination could lead to stereotypes, the theorem is that discrimination increases prejudice through the reactions it provokes its victims. In the first entry, “troubled students” bred a higher rate of troubles, and teachers can then use the troublesome circumstances to justify continuing the discrimelaborates a general stereotype - the teacher thinks Asians are smart, while the Latino or the black could hardly get into the universities they like. This is also a reason why teachers except for Ms. Gruwell believe “troubled kids” don’t have any potential to make a change: they don’t even expect them to change and thus do nothing about them. The stereotypes could also result from lots of factors in society as well. According to my personal research and from a psychological perspective, stereotypes have social, emotional and cognitive roots. Socials roots include social inequalities, discrimination, and what is called in-group bias in psychology. And meanwhile cognitive roots contain categorization. Social inequalities appear everywhere in the book. To be specific, on page 23, a dyslexic student who cannot learn normally as many others do was not treated equally by his teacher and peers. Everyone was laughing at him and saying he was stupid. One may therefore wonder how come ination against those kids. In-group bias occurred as well. On page 8, we all see that students at school actually divide themselves into many groups of their own race. And on page 10, a translated quote meaning “my neighbourhood is the best” indicates that every one of these students thinks his or her race is the best, which meets all the criteria of both in-group bias theory categorization. Last but not the least, speaking of

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