The Freedom Writers Diary - Erin Gruwell [122]
Right before the bell rang, one of my students, Melvin, leaned back in his seat and announced, “I give her five days!”
“You’re on,” said Manny.
“I’m gonna make this lady cry in front of the whole class,” Sharaud bragged as he walked out the door.
At that moment, I could hear my father’s smug “I told you so” echo in my mind. A little less foreboding than “Beware the ides of March,” but accurate nevertheless.
I felt like a failure. It was obvious that I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no idea how to engage these apathetic teenagers, who hated reading and writing, and who apparently hated me, too. To make matters worse, as a student teacher, I did not receive a salary—I actually paid for the privilege! I was holding down two part-time jobs after school and on weekends to help pay for my tuition at the university. I worked at Nordstrom’s department store as a sales clerk in the lingerie department and at a Marriott hotel as a concierge. Paying to teach in the trenches was like subjecting myself to a pie-throw at a carnival while a quarterback threw the pies. At least at the carnival, I’d see it coming.
Once the students left, I picked up the paper airplane from the floor. I circled the room collecting handouts that had been left behind and saw that several desks on the left side of the room had the letters ESL scribbled on them in black marker. In educational jargon, ESL stands for English as a Second Language. When I’d seen ESL etched on my door earlier, I’d foolishly thought some Spanish-speaker was paying homage to my classroom. I soon realized that here, ESL had nothing to do with education—it was the acronym for East Side Longos, the largest Latino gang in Long Beach.
Similar gang insignia were on other desks. These defaced desks marked my students’ territory. The Asian students tagged the desks with the name of their respective gang affiliation, as did the African Americans. My multicultural classes in college had conveniently left out the chapter on gangs and turf warfare.
In lieu of a seating chart, I naively let the students pick their own seats. What struck me now was that they chose comfort zones determined by race. This realization gave me pause. I had imagined my students filing into my class and forming a melting pot of colors as they chose their seats, but the pot must have been pretty cold, because there was absolutely no melting. The Latinos had staked out the left side, while the Asian students occupied the right. The back row was composed of all the African American students, and a couple of Caucasians sheepishly huddled together in the front.
My classroom wasn’t the only place where the students segregated themselves. It was worse out on the school quad. During lunch, they again separated themselves based on racial identity. The students had even nicknamed their distinct areas: “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Chinatown” (even though most of the students were immigrants from Cambodia), “the Ghetto,” and “South of the Border.”
The transparent segregation of the school shocked me, especially since I was expecting Wilson to be a model of integration. On paper, it was one of the most culturally diverse schools in the country, and I’d chosen to student teach there for exactly that reason. Clearly, there was a disparity between what I’d read about Wilson High and its reality.
My dad used to share stories about seeing segregation firsthand. In the early sixties, when he was drafted to play minor league baseball for the Washington Senators, some of his teammates were forced to drink out of separate fountains, eat at different sections in restaurants, and stay at separate motels whenever his team traveled through the South. As a catcher, my dad said he “judged a batter by his swing, not by the color of his skin.” So when Hank Aaron started hitting balls out of the park, my father hailed Aaron as his new hero and named his daughter Erin in honor of the legendary batter.
I was fascinated by my namesake for the way he