Discuss how Erin made connections or build relationships with her students. What did she do connect curriculum to their interests and motivate them to learn?TWH Week 6 pages 1 - 35
Erin Gruwell is an innovative educator with a knack for engaging even the most “unreachable” students. She helped them discover a love of learning and endless possibilities within themselves. When she first began working at Woodrow Wilson High school, Gruwell had mixed emotions as she was on the threshold of tears and feeling overwhelmed (Gruwell, 9). She reflected upon her own life and idolization of her father. Gruwell asserted that her students probably had similar outlooks toward their own fathers, and (in reference to their fathers) “If a kid could be taught to pick up a Molotov cocktail, could he be taught to pick up a pen instead?” (Gruwell, 12). She knew that in order to reach her students in a way they understood best, she would have learn their language (15). Gruwell decided she needed to first win over the natural leaders of the classroom (through sports analogies), Sharaud and Melvin. Theoretically, the remainder of the students would follow suit. Shaurad (a gun-tossing wiseass) and Melvin (a self-proclaimed big man on campus) became her primary informational sources regarding student interest outside of school. Her father, an avid sports fanatic, was able to provide her with information concerning athletes, sports statistics, and football highlights to incorporate within her classroom lessons (16). Reading the text book aloud to the students did not prove to be engaging or productive, so she chose to take them to a Holocaust Museum in L.A. In addition to making the text material “come to life” the students would be able to take a field trip which was a rarity at the school (24). History became animated, engaging her students by appealing to their senses and emotions. Gruwell was able to delve even further into the “world” of her students after she took Shaurad home to his area of Long Beach. She was exposed to a grittier part of town than she had ever seen before and gained a fresh perspective on the students’ home life. Gruwell saw “[f]irsthand a world that didn’t exist in textbooks, museums, or a literary canon” (29). The more familiar she became with her pupils’ eccentricities, the easier it was to engage them and make learning relevantly enjoyable (31). Various learning strategies (“ Instructional methodologies focusing on teaching students how to learn; designed to assist pupils in becoming more actively engaged and involved in their own learning” Garguilo, 220) were incorporated into Gruwell’s lesson plans. The students became active learners via Piaget’s theory of constructivism (“[p]roposing that learners construct, rather than absorb, knowledge from their experiences” OU College of Education, 87), through debates, role-playing, dressing in costume, supplying video clips for the class, and student artwork etc. Gruwell attempted to create relevant lessons so students could make personal connections (32). As stated in the week 7 blog directions,” learning retention is much higher (80%) by "doing"- rather than reading or hearing (5-10%)”.When the school would not allow her students to read copies of Catcher in the Rye because they were stereotyped as “stupid” and the text was “reserved for the Honors students”, she used her Christmas money to buy enough copies for every student within her classroom. Gruwell’s students were given learning opportunities like never before through her determination, innovation, and applicable teaching methods.
On Erin Gruwell’s first day of student teaching, she discussed curriculum while all her students found something more appealing to direct their attention to. One student, named Sharaud, says, “I’m going to make this lady cry in front of the whole class” (Gruwell, 2). Erin was wondering why she decided to become a teacher in the first place. Erin states, “I could hear my father’s smug, ‘I told you so’ echo in my mind” (Gruwell, 3). Erin begins to reflect on her decision to become an English teacher, rather than going to law school. After the verdict in the Rodney King trial, Erin recalls watching all of the rioters, and becoming fixated on the image of a young boy watching an older man, likely his father, throw cocktails at buildings. Erin vividly remembers, “The boy had stars in his eyes. I recognized that look—it was the same reverence I had for my father when I was a child . . . If a kid could be taught to pick up a Molotov cocktail, could he be taught to pick up a pen instead?” (Gruwell, 12) Erin had made a connection between the child and their father figure. Although her first day didn’t go as planned, Erin was determined to relate and reach out to her students, and to do so she would have to learn to speak their language. Erin’s dad gave her a lesson on football, so that she could relate to her toughest students—Sharaud, who was kicked out of his previous school for carrying a gun, and Melvin, who was a football star and “gangsta” in training. She began using her Dad’s football lingo in classes, and slowly she won them over. Throughout her day Erin would try to learn as much as possible about her students stating, “I would treat them as if they were the ones with the Ph.D., a Ph.D. of the streets” (Gruwell, 16). She counted on getting information from the students to supply her with hip material to weave into the lesson plan. Using rap and connections to Snoop Dog were of high interest to the students. One day, Melvin passed a caricature of Sharaud around the class, and to keep a brawl from beginning Erin quickly relates it to propaganda during the Holocaust. None of the students knew what the Holocaust was, but nearly all of them had been shot at, and it was at this point Erin found a teachable moment, stating, “Perhaps I could use the example of the Holocaust and other examples of intolerance to help my students look in the mirror and evaluate their own lives” (Gruwell, 21).
At first, Erin began reading chapters aloud during class, but she quickly realized she needed a new approach to bring the chapters to life so they would be interesting to the students, and motivate them to learn. She decided to take a field trip to a Museum in L.A. focused on the Holocaust. Melvin replied, “Kids like us don’t go on field trips” (Gruwell, 25). However, she managed to fund the field trip, which really showed her students that she cared about them. All of her students were engaged during the tour of the museum because they were all able to relate to the intolerance faced in their own lives. After the trip, Erin took Sharaud and a few other students home and they showed her the “urban nightmare” they were living in. She realized that Sharaud wanted to show her his neighborhood “to understand that there were different kinds of wars and that he was a survivor, too” (Gruwell, 30). At last, Erin had made a connection with her students. Erin decided that she needed to engross her students in her classroom, just as they had been engrossed at the museum. She states, “I needed to create lesson plans to stimulate their senses in the same way the museum did—with photos, videos, and hands-on technology” (Gruwell, 31). It was at this point she realized what Jean Piaget had proposed. Students weren’t going to simply absorb the information by reading out loud in class, and writing boring 5 paragraph essays; they needed to construct their knowledge by being active learners by using the environment and other props. Erin would use costumes and props and her genuine goofiness to involve all students in the lesson. Erin states, “Collectively, we could make any costume, draw any picture, and find any song to illustrate my English lessons” (Gruwell 32). She entwined her student’s personal recollections and idiosyncrasies to fit video clips, artwork, role plays, and show-and-tells into relevant lesson plans to engross all her students. Erin states, “After we finished To Kill a Mockingbird, I decided to find another piece of literature that would make them think critically, question authority, and reexamine their own beliefs” (Gruwell, 33). She decided on Catcher in the Rye, but the co-chair of the English Department refused to loan her the books saying Erin’s students were “too stupid” to understand the books. Erin realized this statement must be a self-fulfilling prophecy her students were accustomed to, but she wanted to change her students’ perspectives. She bought the books with her Christmas money, and although the students wondered why she would waste her own money on them, she told them it wasn’t a waste at all. Erin’s students were able to connect to the angst because all of them had been the outcast. Erin was able to build relationships with her students by speaking their language, and learning from them. Her curriculum was derived from their interests, and personal connections. She motivated them to learn by using her quirkiness to create lesson plans that were active, interesting, and entertaining.
Erin Gruwell proves to be an inspirational, driven, successful, and motivated teacher within the first few pages of her memoir, Teach With Your Heart. As a young white woman who had grown up in a primarily white and overly-privileged community, taking on a teaching position in the drastically different Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach was a very dedicated and awe-inspiring decision Erin made as a student teacher. Her classroom was filled with a diverse body of students, mostly African American and Latino--a population she was very unused to surrounding herself with. Erin writes, "The transparent segregation of the school shocked me, especially since I was expecting Wilson to be a model of integration" (4). She realized immediately she "didn't know what [she] was doing" or "how to engage these apathetic teenagers who hated reading" (3). While some teachers would become defeated and distraught, Erin took her challenging class head-on. She was committed to reaching out to her students on both an academic and personal level. She soon learned many of her students were from terrible family backgrounds, usually including horrible criminal tragedies. Through observation, Erin saw some of her students, in particular a young man named Sharaud, enjoyed sports and conversing about sport-related topics. Determined to speak in her students "language", Erin sought help from her father, Steve Gruwell, a previous baseball player, coach, and history teacher. After her father filled her in on the latest sports happenings, Erin relayed her information to her students, hoping to evoke some sort of response. Luckily, the students realized their teacher was not as unapproachable as they thought at first glance. Erin then became more comfortable and tried to tap into the pop-culture knowledge of her students, teaching poetry through rap since Long Beach was the home of the at-the-time-popular Snoop Dogg. The students quickly warmed up to Erin and began to call her "Ms. G". In one particularly eye-opening class period, Erin learned her students sadly knew nothing of the tragic Holocaust. The students were engrossed and Erin was determined to take them on a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance, despite the fact her students believed "kids like us don't go on field trips" (25). After successfully planning the trip, she was able to connect with her students on a very emotional and personal level, for they began to see the tragedies that surrounded them and began to open up to each other as peers, friends, and human beings. Erin then took her students to her 'neck of the woods' and exposed them to her personal background. This allowed her students to make a connection to Erin and to see she was not only a teacher, but a mentor and role model. Erin reached out to her students on many levels and was completely committed to helping each one of them, for their sadness and failure-like attitude tore at her heart. Erin spent countless amounts of money, hours of her time, and emotional stress on ensuring her students (the children that were usually looked down upon and discouraged) a wonderful opportunity toward education. By investing personal time and money, attempting to reach out to her students through speaking their "language" and learning about their personal lives, and allowing her students to open up to both her and their peers, Erin Gruwell quickly gained respect from her students and became a passionate and successful teacher who 'teaches with her heart'.
The life changing story of a student teacher, Erin Gruwell, blew teaching expectations out of the water as explained in her book, Teach with your Heart. With determination and ambition she took a classroom full of ethnically diverse teenagers at Woodrow Wilson High school who faced and overcame immense struggles in their lives and turned them into a family so to speak. The integrated school was labeling the diverse population as undesirables and treating them like it as well. When Gruwell asked the English department if her students could read Catcher in the Rye, the co-chair shot her down saying Gruwell’s students were “too stupid” to read and understand the books. With her hard work Gruwell found several ways around the system to give these students the education they deserved. In this discovery process however she found it quit challenging at times. A white privileged woman trying to teach a classroom full of uninterested “gangstas” was going to be a lot tougher than she thought or could ever imagine. Close to tears on her first day of class “I could hear my father’s smug ‘I told you so’ echo in my mind” (Gruwell, 3) Gruwell knew she needed to make a connection to her students in order to teach them but was struggling to find a way how; the old lecture and read out of the book, wasn’t getting her anywhere with her new students. Gruwell recalled watching the Rodney King trial with all the rioters and remembers a boy looking up at an older man throwing cocktails at buildings and thought to herself about the connections made between the child and the father like figure. “The boy had stars in his eyes. I recognized that look—it was the same reverence I had for my father when I was a child . . . If a kid could be taught to pick up a Molotov cocktail, could he be taught to pick up a pen instead?” (Gruwell, 12) Gruwell began making changes to her teaching style to engage the students and to have them make connections to their own lives. In order for this to kind of learning to occur however, she had to learn about her students starting with their language. Sharaud, an athlete in Gruwell’s classroom seemed to portray leader-like qualities, so from the help of her dad, a retired baseball player, coach and history teacher, Gruwell won him over with her sports connections followed by the rest of the class. She continued with this approach with Snoop Dog, one of the student’s favorite rappers, to help learn what her students were all about. The topic of the Holocaust was brought up and the students could finally see a connection with their own harsh and terrible lives and history. After seeing how well the students responded to Gruwell’s connection to their own lives she decided to take them on a field trip to a Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles. One of the students responded to this gesture by saying “kids like us don’t go on field trips.” (Gruwell, 25) The field trip made the Holocaust truly come alive to the students and they made deep connections with their own struggles of trying to stay alive. “I needed to create lesson plans to stimulate their senses in the same way the museum did-with photos, videos, and hands-on technology (Gruwell, 31) Gruwell did just that in her classroom throughout the years, to inspire and change the lives of students and teachers everywhere. With her hard work, determination and heart, Gruwell changed teaching for the better.
“If I was going to survive the semester, I knew that I’d have to learn to speak their language.” Erin made a great point, her main goal was to understand and relate to the kids, and I believe she accomplished this. She used three main tactics to make connections with her students: sports, music, and language. Of course she had to do some research about sports, contacting her dad (a previous scouting coach for the Cincinnati Reds), who helped her bring sports analogies into the classroom. Erin is a very active teacher; she always had the class participating. She had one of her toughest students rap for the class whether it be for poetry or just an example. Therefore, the students could relate to Snoop Doggy Dog the most talked about rapper in the entire book. I loved how she would go by the flow with her lesson plans; they were never set in stone and they were very flexible. At the end of chapter 3, she found a note being passed around during class and once it got to her she realized it was a picture making fun of one of the kids lips in class. She then sparked an idea to teach her students about the Holocaust because almost all of them have not even heard about the tragic event and it could definitely relate to the students lives. After the field trip to the museum, everything changed in Erin’s classroom. The more creative she was the more engaged and motivated her students were. She inspired me to become more creative, I want my students to love Math obviously, but doesn’t every teacher want that? Therefore, I decided that if I wasn’t going to be excited about my lesson plan I doubt my students would be either, encouraging me to bring creativity not only into the classroom, but outside it too.
Erin Gruwell was thrown into a situation she wasn't expecting, and was required to make due with the knowledge she had to somehow scrap together a class that held little expectations for themselves. At first, the kids in her class just saw her on the surface. She was just another rich, naive white lady to them. However, she quickly proved that she genuinely cared about them by weaving football, music, and pop culture into their lessons, in order to be more relevant. This showed her students that she really was interested in their lives out side of school, and actually wanted to teach them. Compared to the other teachers in the school, Gruwell was one of the few that wanted more from her class. She set the bar high, instead of leaving it low to accommodate "those" kids. She started using words that they used, and tailored her lessons to the way that they learned. She made her class fun and interactive so as to keep the student's attention. One thing she did to make a caring connection with her students, was when she stuck up for Sharaud when Melvin passed around a mean picture. She was able to use that opportunity to relate their own lives and experiences and emotions, to things that have happened in the past (the Holocaust). Another thing that really showed her compassion was when she used her own funds to give the students books, and when she took them to the museum. Those small acts let the students know that she cared, and that was rare for them. When they noticed how she was going out on a limb for them, they were able to respect her and do more for her. While these students were always seen as "stupid" or looked down upon, Gruwell lifted them up to higher standards, and that inspired and motivated them in a new way.
In the book, "Teach With Your Heart," Erin has trouble at first reaching the students and helping them learn the material. Then she has a great idea to start connecting the material to relevant things in her student's life. So she starts using football to help relate material with one of her students. Then she starts using hip hop music to relate with more of her students because a few of the students in the class claim to know Snoop Dogg. When she starts realizing that using this method of teaching really helps the students learn, she starts going out and studying the lives of her students so that she can better prepare herself for lessons in class. By doing this her students had the motivation to learn because they saw how much she actually cared about them getting a good education. The students actually wanted to be in class and participate in the lesson, whether it was reading out loud or acting out a scene from a play they were reading. Erin felt that her students were really starting to succeed in the class and was happy that all of the students were staying interested and completing assignments. This is exactly the type of effort she was hoping for in the beginning of the book, and she had finally figured out how to reach the students. Then she even went out of her way to purchase books with her own money, and that brought the respect in the classroom to a whole new level. The students really understood that she cared whether they got their education or not, and they even loved the book that she had bought them to read. The book was, "Catcher in the Rye," and many of the students felt that they could relate to Holden because they felt the same way he did about life. The students really started to accept Gruwell and wanted her to give them more information and actually wanted to learn more from her. That's when the school decided that she could extend her student teaching period to the end of the year because she was doing such a great job with them.
Erin Gruwell is an innovative educator with a knack for engaging even the most “unreachable” students. She helped them discover a love of learning and endless possibilities within themselves. When she first began working at Woodrow Wilson High school, Gruwell had mixed emotions as she was on the threshold of tears and feeling overwhelmed (Gruwell, 9). She reflected upon her own life and idolization of her father. Gruwell asserted that her students probably had similar outlooks toward their own fathers, and (in reference to their fathers) “If a kid could be taught to pick up a Molotov cocktail, could he be taught to pick up a pen instead?” (Gruwell, 12). She knew that in order to reach her students in a way they understood best, she would have learn their language (15). Gruwell decided she needed to first win over the natural leaders of the classroom (through sports analogies), Sharaud and Melvin. Theoretically, the remainder of the students would follow suit. Shaurad (a gun-tossing wiseass) and Melvin (a self-proclaimed big man on campus) became her primary informational sources regarding student interest outside of school. Her father, an avid sports fanatic, was able to provide her with information concerning athletes, sports statistics, and football highlights to incorporate within her classroom lessons (16). Reading the text book aloud to the students did not prove to be engaging or productive, so she chose to take them to a Holocaust Museum in L.A. In addition to making the text material “come to life” the students would be able to take a field trip which was a rarity at the school (24). History became animated, engaging her students by appealing to their senses and emotions. Gruwell was able to delve even further into the “world” of her students after she took Shaurad home to his area of Long Beach. She was exposed to a grittier part of town than she had ever seen before and gained a fresh perspective on the students’ home life. Gruwell saw “[f]irsthand a world that didn’t exist in textbooks, museums, or a literary canon” (29). The more familiar she became with her pupils’ eccentricities, the easier it was to engage them and make learning relevantly enjoyable (31). Various learning strategies (“ Instructional methodologies focusing on teaching students how to learn; designed to assist pupils in becoming more actively engaged and involved in their own learning” Garguilo, 220) were incorporated into Gruwell’s lesson plans. The students became active learners via Piaget’s theory of constructivism (“[p]roposing that learners construct, rather than absorb, knowledge from their experiences” OU College of Education, 87), through debates, role-playing, dressing in costume, supplying video clips for the class, and student artwork etc. Gruwell attempted to create relevant lessons so students could make personal connections (32). As stated in the week 7 blog directions,” learning retention is much higher (80%) by "doing"- rather than reading or hearing (5-10%)”.When the school would not allow her students to read copies of Catcher in the Rye because they were stereotyped as “stupid” and the text was “reserved for the Honors students”, she used her Christmas money to buy enough copies for every student within her classroom. Gruwell’s students were given learning opportunities like never before through her determination, innovation, and applicable teaching methods.
ReplyDeleteOn Erin Gruwell’s first day of student teaching, she discussed curriculum while all her students found something more appealing to direct their attention to. One student, named Sharaud, says, “I’m going to make this lady cry in front of the whole class” (Gruwell, 2). Erin was wondering why she decided to become a teacher in the first place. Erin states, “I could hear my father’s smug, ‘I told you so’ echo in my mind” (Gruwell, 3). Erin begins to reflect on her decision to become an English teacher, rather than going to law school. After the verdict in the Rodney King trial, Erin recalls watching all of the rioters, and becoming fixated on the image of a young boy watching an older man, likely his father, throw cocktails at buildings. Erin vividly remembers, “The boy had stars in his eyes. I recognized that look—it was the same reverence I had for my father when I was a child . . . If a kid could be taught to pick up a Molotov cocktail, could he be taught to pick up a pen instead?” (Gruwell, 12) Erin had made a connection between the child and their father figure. Although her first day didn’t go as planned, Erin was determined to relate and reach out to her students, and to do so she would have to learn to speak their language. Erin’s dad gave her a lesson on football, so that she could relate to her toughest students—Sharaud, who was kicked out of his previous school for carrying a gun, and Melvin, who was a football star and “gangsta” in training. She began using her Dad’s football lingo in classes, and slowly she won them over. Throughout her day Erin would try to learn as much as possible about her students stating, “I would treat them as if they were the ones with the Ph.D., a Ph.D. of the streets” (Gruwell, 16). She counted on getting information from the students to supply her with hip material to weave into the lesson plan. Using rap and connections to Snoop Dog were of high interest to the students. One day, Melvin passed a caricature of Sharaud around the class, and to keep a brawl from beginning Erin quickly relates it to propaganda during the Holocaust. None of the students knew what the Holocaust was, but nearly all of them had been shot at, and it was at this point Erin found a teachable moment, stating, “Perhaps I could use the example of the Holocaust and other examples of intolerance to help my students look in the mirror and evaluate their own lives” (Gruwell, 21).
ReplyDeleteAt first, Erin began reading chapters aloud during class, but she quickly realized she needed a new approach to bring the chapters to life so they would be interesting to the students, and motivate them to learn. She decided to take a field trip to a Museum in L.A. focused on the Holocaust. Melvin replied, “Kids like us don’t go on field trips” (Gruwell, 25). However, she managed to fund the field trip, which really showed her students that she cared about them. All of her students were engaged during the tour of the museum because they were all able to relate to the intolerance faced in their own lives. After the trip, Erin took Sharaud and a few other students home and they showed her the “urban nightmare” they were living in. She realized that Sharaud wanted to show her his neighborhood “to understand that there were different kinds of wars and that he was a survivor, too” (Gruwell, 30). At last, Erin had made a connection with her students. Erin decided that she needed to engross her students in her classroom, just as they had been engrossed at the museum. She states, “I needed to create lesson plans to stimulate their senses in the same way the museum did—with photos, videos, and hands-on technology” (Gruwell, 31). It was at this point she realized what Jean Piaget had proposed. Students weren’t going to simply absorb the information by reading out loud in class, and writing boring 5 paragraph essays; they needed to construct their knowledge by being active learners by using the environment and other props. Erin would use costumes and props and her genuine goofiness to involve all students in the lesson. Erin states, “Collectively, we could make any costume, draw any picture, and find any song to illustrate my English lessons” (Gruwell 32). She entwined her student’s personal recollections and idiosyncrasies to fit video clips, artwork, role plays, and show-and-tells into relevant lesson plans to engross all her students. Erin states, “After we finished To Kill a Mockingbird, I decided to find another piece of literature that would make them think critically, question authority, and reexamine their own beliefs” (Gruwell, 33). She decided on Catcher in the Rye, but the co-chair of the English Department refused to loan her the books saying Erin’s students were “too stupid” to understand the books. Erin realized this statement must be a self-fulfilling prophecy her students were accustomed to, but she wanted to change her students’ perspectives. She bought the books with her Christmas money, and although the students wondered why she would waste her own money on them, she told them it wasn’t a waste at all. Erin’s students were able to connect to the angst because all of them had been the outcast. Erin was able to build relationships with her students by speaking their language, and learning from them. Her curriculum was derived from their interests, and personal connections. She motivated them to learn by using her quirkiness to create lesson plans that were active, interesting, and entertaining.
ReplyDeleteErin Gruwell proves to be an inspirational, driven, successful, and motivated teacher within the first few pages of her memoir, Teach With Your Heart. As a young white woman who had grown up in a primarily white and overly-privileged community, taking on a teaching position in the drastically different Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach was a very dedicated and awe-inspiring decision Erin made as a student teacher. Her classroom was filled with a diverse body of students, mostly African American and Latino--a population she was very unused to surrounding herself with. Erin writes, "The transparent segregation of the school shocked me, especially since I was expecting Wilson to be a model of integration" (4). She realized immediately she "didn't know what [she] was doing" or "how to engage these apathetic teenagers who hated reading" (3). While some teachers would become defeated and distraught, Erin took her challenging class head-on. She was committed to reaching out to her students on both an academic and personal level. She soon learned many of her students were from terrible family backgrounds, usually including horrible criminal tragedies. Through observation, Erin saw some of her students, in particular a young man named Sharaud, enjoyed sports and conversing about sport-related topics. Determined to speak in her students "language", Erin sought help from her father, Steve Gruwell, a previous baseball player, coach, and history teacher. After her father filled her in on the latest sports happenings, Erin relayed her information to her students, hoping to evoke some sort of response. Luckily, the students realized their teacher was not as unapproachable as they thought at first glance. Erin then became more comfortable and tried to tap into the pop-culture knowledge of her students, teaching poetry through rap since Long Beach was the home of the at-the-time-popular Snoop Dogg. The students quickly warmed up to Erin and began to call her "Ms. G". In one particularly eye-opening class period, Erin learned her students sadly knew nothing of the tragic Holocaust. The students were engrossed and Erin was determined to take them on a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance, despite the fact her students believed "kids like us don't go on field trips" (25). After successfully planning the trip, she was able to connect with her students on a very emotional and personal level, for they began to see the tragedies that surrounded them and began to open up to each other as peers, friends, and human beings. Erin then took her students to her 'neck of the woods' and exposed them to her personal background. This allowed her students to make a connection to Erin and to see she was not only a teacher, but a mentor and role model. Erin reached out to her students on many levels and was completely committed to helping each one of them, for their sadness and failure-like attitude tore at her heart. Erin spent countless amounts of money, hours of her time, and emotional stress on ensuring her students (the children that were usually looked down upon and discouraged) a wonderful opportunity toward education. By investing personal time and money, attempting to reach out to her students through speaking their "language" and learning about their personal lives, and allowing her students to open up to both her and their peers, Erin Gruwell quickly gained respect from her students and became a passionate and successful teacher who 'teaches with her heart'.
ReplyDeleteThe life changing story of a student teacher, Erin Gruwell, blew teaching expectations out of the water as explained in her book, Teach with your Heart. With determination and ambition she took a classroom full of ethnically diverse teenagers at Woodrow Wilson High school who faced and overcame immense struggles in their lives and turned them into a family so to speak. The integrated school was labeling the diverse population as undesirables and treating them like it as well. When Gruwell asked the English department if her students could read Catcher in the Rye, the co-chair shot her down saying Gruwell’s students were “too stupid” to read and understand the books. With her hard work Gruwell found several ways around the system to give these students the education they deserved. In this discovery process however she found it quit challenging at times. A white privileged woman trying to teach a classroom full of uninterested “gangstas” was going to be a lot tougher than she thought or could ever imagine. Close to tears on her first day of class “I could hear my father’s smug ‘I told you so’ echo in my mind” (Gruwell, 3) Gruwell knew she needed to make a connection to her students in order to teach them but was struggling to find a way how; the old lecture and read out of the book, wasn’t getting her anywhere with her new students. Gruwell recalled watching the Rodney King trial with all the rioters and remembers a boy looking up at an older man throwing cocktails at buildings and thought to herself about the connections made between the child and the father like figure. “The boy had stars in his eyes. I recognized that look—it was the same reverence I had for my father when I was a child . . . If a kid could be taught to pick up a Molotov cocktail, could he be taught to pick up a pen instead?” (Gruwell, 12) Gruwell began making changes to her teaching style to engage the students and to have them make connections to their own lives. In order for this to kind of learning to occur however, she had to learn about her students starting with their language. Sharaud, an athlete in Gruwell’s classroom seemed to portray leader-like qualities, so from the help of her dad, a retired baseball player, coach and history teacher, Gruwell won him over with her sports connections followed by the rest of the class. She continued with this approach with Snoop Dog, one of the student’s favorite rappers, to help learn what her students were all about. The topic of the Holocaust was brought up and the students could finally see a connection with their own harsh and terrible lives and history. After seeing how well the students responded to Gruwell’s connection to their own lives she decided to take them on a field trip to a Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles. One of the students responded to this gesture by saying “kids like us don’t go on field trips.” (Gruwell, 25) The field trip made the Holocaust truly come alive to the students and they made deep connections with their own struggles of trying to stay alive. “I needed to create lesson plans to stimulate their senses in the same way the museum did-with photos, videos, and hands-on technology (Gruwell, 31) Gruwell did just that in her classroom throughout the years, to inspire and change the lives of students and teachers everywhere. With her hard work, determination and heart, Gruwell changed teaching for the better.
ReplyDelete“If I was going to survive the semester, I knew that I’d have to learn to speak their language.” Erin made a great point, her main goal was to understand and relate to the kids, and I believe she accomplished this. She used three main tactics to make connections with her students: sports, music, and language. Of course she had to do some research about sports, contacting her dad (a previous scouting coach for the Cincinnati Reds), who helped her bring sports analogies into the classroom.
ReplyDeleteErin is a very active teacher; she always had the class participating. She had one of her toughest students rap for the class whether it be for poetry or just an example. Therefore, the students could relate to Snoop Doggy Dog the most talked about rapper in the entire book.
I loved how she would go by the flow with her lesson plans; they were never set in stone and they were very flexible. At the end of chapter 3, she found a note being passed around during class and once it got to her she realized it was a picture making fun of one of the kids lips in class. She then sparked an idea to teach her students about the Holocaust because almost all of them have not even heard about the tragic event and it could definitely relate to the students lives. After the field trip to the museum, everything changed in Erin’s classroom. The more creative she was the more engaged and motivated her students were. She inspired me to become more creative, I want my students to love Math obviously, but doesn’t every teacher want that? Therefore, I decided that if I wasn’t going to be excited about my lesson plan I doubt my students would be either, encouraging me to bring creativity not only into the classroom, but outside it too.
Erin Gruwell was thrown into a situation she wasn't expecting, and was required to make due with the knowledge she had to somehow scrap together a class that held little expectations for themselves. At first, the kids in her class just saw her on the surface. She was just another rich, naive white lady to them. However, she quickly proved that she genuinely cared about them by weaving football, music, and pop culture into their lessons, in order to be more relevant. This showed her students that she really was interested in their lives out side of school, and actually wanted to teach them. Compared to the other teachers in the school, Gruwell was one of the few that wanted more from her class. She set the bar high, instead of leaving it low to accommodate "those" kids. She started using words that they used, and tailored her lessons to the way that they learned. She made her class fun and interactive so as to keep the student's attention. One thing she did to make a caring connection with her students, was when she stuck up for Sharaud when Melvin passed around a mean picture. She was able to use that opportunity to relate their own lives and experiences and emotions, to things that have happened in the past (the Holocaust). Another thing that really showed her compassion was when she used her own funds to give the students books, and when she took them to the museum. Those small acts let the students know that she cared, and that was rare for them. When they noticed how she was going out on a limb for them, they were able to respect her and do more for her. While these students were always seen as "stupid" or looked down upon, Gruwell lifted them up to higher standards, and that inspired and motivated them in a new way.
ReplyDeleteIn the book, "Teach With Your Heart," Erin has trouble at first reaching the students and helping them learn the material. Then she has a great idea to start connecting the material to relevant things in her student's life. So she starts using football to help relate material with one of her students. Then she starts using hip hop music to relate with more of her students because a few of the students in the class claim to know Snoop Dogg. When she starts realizing that using this method of teaching really helps the students learn, she starts going out and studying the lives of her students so that she can better prepare herself for lessons in class. By doing this her students had the motivation to learn because they saw how much she actually cared about them getting a good education. The students actually wanted to be in class and participate in the lesson, whether it was reading out loud or acting out a scene from a play they were reading. Erin felt that her students were really starting to succeed in the class and was happy that all of the students were staying interested and completing assignments. This is exactly the type of effort she was hoping for in the beginning of the book, and she had finally figured out how to reach the students. Then she even went out of her way to purchase books with her own money, and that brought the respect in the classroom to a whole new level. The students really understood that she cared whether they got their education or not, and they even loved the book that she had bought them to read. The book was, "Catcher in the Rye," and many of the students felt that they could relate to Holden because they felt the same way he did about life. The students really started to accept Gruwell and wanted her to give them more information and actually wanted to learn more from her. That's when the school decided that she could extend her student teaching period to the end of the year because she was doing such a great job with them.
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