The Freedom Writers Diary - Erin Gruwell [64]
At sixteen, I’ve probably witnessed more dead bodies than a mortician. Murder plays a big role in my project. Every time I step out of my front door, I’m faced with the risk of being shot. Just recently, while I was sound asleep, I awoke to the sound of gunshots. It was 2:30 in the morning. After the gunshots stopped, a woman screamed, “Help me, please…why, why, why?” I looked out of my bedroom window to see a man with a bullet wound in his head the size of a quarter and blood oozing out of his head like ketchup coming from a Heinz bottle.
Besides gang violence, domestic violence, or spousal abuse, is common. So common, in fact, that people ignore it, turn the other cheek, or go back to bed. I have watched men pistol-whip their girlfriends or smash their heads through car windows. Damn! I have seen a lot of crazy stuff. Stuff that makes me thankful it’s not me.
It’s easier for me to pretend I don’t live where I live or see what I see. That’s why I go to school so far away from home so I can escape my reality. Like Anne Frank, I live through the pain of being stuck in my house because I don’t want to become a casualty of war, gang warfare that is going on outside of my bedroom walls. I sit in my room wishing I could fly away from all of the madness. Writing about my pain will only make it worse.
Diary 70
Dear Diary,
John Tu donated thirty-five computers to our class, and what a difference they make! Ms. G said we’re not limited to just using them on English assignments. She’s going to let us use them for projects for our other classes before and after school. The most amazing part is that Ms. G and Mr. Tu created a contract stating that whoever has the highest grade point average from now until graduation will win a computer for college. That means that I have a chance to get a computer if I keep my grades up. For some reason, I feel like I’ll do better than I have the past two years.
It feels good to start off with a clean slate. Not many people get a chance like this since most people seem to make judgments based on the past. Unfortunately, the education system tends to dismiss kids based on their past and not on their potential. Throughout my years of education, only Ms. Gruwell took action to help me with my learning disability. As a matter of fact, when I told one teacher in jr. high that I thought I had dyslexia, he told me that I was just lazy. Yeah, right! Me, lazy? I would end up with the same routine before every vocabulary test or important assignment. I would spend a week trying to memorize words that, no matter what I did, I couldn’t spell right. On test days, I would turn in the test, and get an F. All I could do was hope that I’d do better on the next one.
It only got worse in high school, where there were more spelling and essays tests, with more complicated words that seemed too impossible to memorize. Finally, I just started to think, “Why should I even try? I am just going to end up with an ‘F’ anyway.” It seems that an “F” was going to symbolize what I would end up in the future. I felt especially hopeless and depressed when I had to take an essay test where spelling counted toward my grade. I wanted to do well, but no matter how many great answers I had in my head, if I couldn’t spell words right, I was going to fail. It wasn’t like I could ask someone sitting next to me how to spell a word, and I couldn’t just bust out the dictionary, because that would be considered cheating. That’s why I always hated turning my essays in, because the teacher would look at me as if he knew that I was going to fail. On one essay test, my sociology teacher even told me that he “didn’t expect me to do well anyway.” When he told me this, I felt hopeless because I couldn’t prove him wrong, at least not yet.
When I heard that we were going to write stories, I can’t tell you that I was too happy. I started to picture me with a dictionary, looking