The Freedom Writers Diary - Erin Gruwell [123]
After lunch, all the kids from the “Beverly Hills 90210” section trotted to class together. Among them were students whose uniforms and matching school sweatshirts identified them as water polo players, cheerleaders, and student council members. Their classrooms had banners that read “Home of the Distinguished Scholars” and were supplied with freshly published textbooks and new computers. In contrast, my room was pretty barren. It didn’t have any banners, much less a computer. All I had to work with were hand-me-down textbooks, riddled with graffiti.
In the Distinguished Scholars classrooms, the desks were neatly lined up and Caucasian students filled most of the seats. Nestled between them may have been an occasional African American or Asian student, but it was clear that a tracking system, largely racially determined, was in place.
The few Caucasians in my class were stigmatized as outcasts by their former friends in the Distinguished Scholars program. The general assumption was that they had failed out of the program, had a learning disability, or had just returned from rehab. By the look of things, some were probably on their way back in.
There was a perception in the affluent neighborhood south of the school that the caliber of students attending Wilson had plummeted in recent years. At one point, Wilson High was considered a highly desirable public high school, but there had been noticeable white flight after the school district implemented an intradistrict busing program. By the early nineties, the Caucasian population had decreased to less than 25 percent. Some speculated that the Distinguished Scholars program was an attempt to rescue the school’s declining reputation and keep neighborhood kids from transferring out. My hope was that I could find something “distinguished” in all of my students.
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At the end of my first day, the security guard popped his head into my classroom. Earlier that morning, he had stopped me in the hallway. He had a walkie-talkie in one hand and a metal-detector wand in the other. “We have zero tolerance for weapons on campus,” he warned me. Then he asked to see my ID. I handed him my student ID card from the university. “I’m a student teacher,” I stammered. “I will be teaching junior English.” “Sorry,” he said. “You look like one of the students.”
Now the security guard was saying, “There’s a police officer looking for you.”
“Why?” I asked. “Did somebody steal my car?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “He said he knows you.”
I went to the office and was surprised to see my old neighbor Mark in full police uniform.
“Mark, what are you doing here?” I asked.
“Your brother asked me to check up on you,” he said. Mark had been checking up on me since I was seven. When we were in the sixth grade, he even threatened to use his nunchakus to beat up neighbor boys who were simply flirting with me.
Mark and I had grown up in the same gated community, but I always suspected that he wanted to keep people outside of those gates as much as I wanted to bring them in. Our paths diverged after high school. I went on to college, and Mark entered the police academy. Coincidentally, we both ended up in Long Beach. It was obvious that Mark had not come to Long Beach out of moral obligation. He came to Long Beach because that’s where the action was.
“I don’t see any bullet holes, so I assume you survived your first day,” he said.
“Barely!” I blurted, laughing. “My family’s a little paranoid,” I said. “My father called me this morning and said, ‘Erin, no matter what you do, please don’t eat the apples!’ He’s convinced they’re laced with strychnine or razor blades.”
“He’s probably right!” he said, chuckling.
“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad!” I said.
“Don’t tell me it’s not that bad. I’m a cop, remember? I’m the one arresting these kids. There are parts of Long Beach that are