Eisenhower GI to perform 'Freedom Writers Diary' on FB Live

After learning of their disappointment of the cancellation of the Group Interpretation season, author Erin Gruwell met with Eisenhower High School students this spring to discuss her famous book "The Freedom Writers Diary."

Eisenhower teacher and GI director Mark Urban reached out to Gruwell after the COVID-19 shutdown brought all school activities to a sudden halt. He talked about their anticipation of performing

Gruwell immediately responded and offered to meet his students via Zoom.

Now the Eisenhower students will get the chance to perform for Gruwell, who will host a Facebook Live airing of "The Freedom Writers Diary" on Thursday, June 18 at 6:30 p.m. Central.

Anyone may watch it live at the link:
https://www.facebook.com/freedomwritersfoundation/posts/10158350186461591

Library Journal summarizes her book:

When Gruwell was a first-year high school teacher in Long Beach, CA, teaching the "unteachables" (kids that no other teacher wanted to deal with), she discovered that most of her students had not heard of the Holocaust.

Shocked, she introduced them to books about tolerance, first-person accounts by the likes of Anne Frank and Zlata Filopvic, who chronicled her life in war-torn Sarajevo.

The students were inspired to start keeping diaries of their lives that showed the violence, homelessness, racism, illness, and abuse that surrounded them.

These student diaries form the basis of this book, which is cut from the same mold as Dangerous Minds: the outsider teacher, who isn't supposed to last a month, comes in and rebuilds a class with tough love and hard work.

Most readers will be proud to see how these students have succeeded; at the end of their four-year experience, the Freedom Writers as they called themselves, in honor of the Freedom Riders of the 1960s, had all graduated.