"Teach with your heart": a conversation with Erin Gruwell.

"Why hadn't I gone to law school like I'd originally planned?" Erin 6ruwell asked herself during her first tense moments as a teacher. Confronted with hostile students who weren't used to getting--or giving--respect, Gruwell initially "felt like a failure." Her perseverance, which she recounts in her memoir, Teach With Your Heart, is now the stuff of legend--and a feature film. JS recently spoke with Gruwell.

JS: When and where did your career begin?

EG: I began student-teaching in 1993, in Long Beach, California. The Freedom Writers began in 1994. The biggest challenge was responding to the aftermath of the 1992 riots and murders [that broke out] in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. Long Beach was severely impacted. I was coming into an environment where there was devastation. The cause-and-effect of murder really has a lingering effect with kids. There was just a perpetuation of violence.

JS: How did you get your students to respond to you?

EG: I was living in Newport Beach at the time. It is an affluent community, with not a lot of diversity, unfortunately. The contrast made my students suspicious of me. They immediately pigeonholed me. I worked really hard to prove to them that stereotypes on any level--economic, racial, gender--first, I wouldn't stand for them, and second, I would prove those stereotypes wrong.

I really felt it was very important with teenagers to be candid, not to sugarcoat things. Through To Kill a Mockingbird, The Diary of Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel's Night, and other works of literature, we looked at racism, violence, and tolerance in [the students'] communities.

JS: What are you doing these days?

EG: My students and 1 started the Freedom Writers Foundation, a nonprofit organization. We're training teachers to engage and inspire their students. We're also raising scholarship money. The proceeds from The Freedom Writers Diary [the book on which the film is based] paid for college for many of my students.

JS: What advice do you have for other teachers?

EG: In this age of unfunded mandates, to bring passion back to our profession, teachers have to teach to students--not to tests. We've lost that along the way because of this government obsession with test-taking. It is doing a disservice to our profession. It is really important for teachers to reach students through all their learning modalities.

A lot of kids aren't great test takers. Not every kid can sit in a classroom and listen to a lecture. 1 always found it important to infuse elements of pop culture in my class. I have to be very clever--use photos, video clips, snippets from movies, have students role-play, ask questions, draw, and act ... all of those things we did in kindergarten. When you go into a kindergarten class today, you see this unbridled enthusiasm. We've lost that in this era of test-taking. When you have that kind of environment that is stimulating, nonthreatening, very Socratic, that's where learning takes place.