Young Voices Writing to be Free

As I sit here showing Freedom Writers to my developmental writing class, I'm remembering the first day I taught a tough crowd. There were thirty plus kids sitting on windowsills because there weren't enough desks in the room. We had to take turns stealing chairs from the next room pretending nonchalance.

Everyone was looking at their schedules scratching their heads. Wearing yellow, wearing blue, flying red or black high above their heads. All in one place in a truce because the state is paying for it. Well isn't that nice.

No one paid for me.

Not enough seats...no student loans to pay back: two or three whole years for free. No air conditioning, no problem. These kids were in school for free and...it took me eight years to get a BA. Nobody guarantees balance in life. Things are often more available to some than to others.

People taunt and test because they can't stand their own lives. Talking shit about other races and creeds because of their own insecurities.

"Can I please get outta here?" says the white kid in the class...

Hatred because of color and beliefs. What a weak basis. We all die and we all rot in the ground. When we die nothing  matters. No colors on rotting bones no beliefs in skeletal remains with organs removed. No system of beliefs just bodies falling apart until they're gone.

It takes a Holocaust to make gang members see that there is something fucked up about gangs. It takes fights and guns and drugs and dead friends for kids to find common ground. Well this is not a new idea, so why is it that this film impressed me in a new way this time around?

Teaching people how to write seems like a new experience every time around. Can we even really teach people to write? I like to think of it more as...helping them find their voice. So why even write about it, this process, this struggle to speak? Well it parallels life really.

Each time I write something I need to find the correct words. Every sentence has to flow with the one before it and the one after it. There can be no fragmented running-on of sorts. It has to work, flow smoothly, be perfect. Sadly, college students feel that they have a certain sort of perfection expected of them at times too. What they do with it is a different story.

Sometimes they drink it up and dull the necessity of handing it in on time. Some of them sleep in and think that by missing class on the due date they won't get a negative response. I didn't do that when I was in school...racking up debt and student loans. Maybe if it were free I wouldn't have cared as much...somehow I doubt that.

So we watch the film and we get up to the part where they are back in the start of a semester in their sophomore year. A chubby Mexican kid in desperate need of a haircut reads from his journal, telling the tale of being evicted along with his whole family. Thinking he should have "asked for something cheaper at Christmas."

"Miss English are you crying?" jokes a young student sitting in his dress blues with a giant poster of a brain and its contents across his desk. "Don't worry I'm gonna write you one of those letters at the end of this quarter" says an enthusiastic Caribbean transplant with five names--a fascinating story in itself. The twenty year old mother of two between them alternates shoulders to lean her painstakingly styled bouffant upon, popping her gum and interjecting "I don't really get it" and "What did that mean?" as she crosses her Louboutins at the ankles.

I see it all in a new light again. No matter where we go, or who we teach, we end up with a different perspective. These are not the same kids that sat on windowsills and smuggled chairs down the sweaty corridors, but they sure do have a sense of style...

Not sure what to expect over the summer with the next groups of incoming minds, but then again it wouldn't be as much fun if we did.