Project Description

For my education class, I was assigned to read the book Teaching Hope. This blog is my project to go along with this book, and I hope that you will help me make it a worthy project!

THE BOOK:
When Erin Gruwell began her career as a teacher, she was idealistic and excited to change the lives of students. After her syllabus was folded into a paper airplane and thrown at her head, however, she realized that her job was going to prove much more difficult than she had anticipated. After much trial and error, she discovered that by integrating the pains and hardships her students experienced every day into her lessons, she could finally get through to these troubled kids. By the time they graduated, Gruwell compiled their journal entries into one volume, and The Freedom Writers Diary was published.
As Gruwell began to notice that teachers across the country were using this book to change their own teaching styles and understand their students better, she realized that students are not the only ones with stories that should be heard. She scoured the country and found 150 teachers who were using her book as a model, and she asked them to compile their own stories to be published. Teaching Hope is the book that holds these stories. From tales of school bombings, divorce, problems at home, the death of students, and other heartbreaking incidents, these teachers prove that they are truly fighting for their students every day through their perseverance and determination to understand the problems of the average high school adolescent.



THE BLOG:
On this blog, I will post summaries of just a few of the stories within Teaching Hope. I hope that these stories will touch each person that reads them, and that you will be inspired to share your own stories of teachers who have touched your lives. Please see my post entitled "Students' Stories" for directions on how to share your stories.