Erin Gruwell Research Paper

All leaders can get people to achieve, but influential leaders get people to want to achieve. That’s exactly what Erin Gruwell, an urban area English teacher did. She made the people around her want to achieve. We all need someone positive in our lives who makes us want to do better and strive for excellence when we want to give up. Eventually, we will be able to motivate ourselves. Now, Erin Gruwell fascinated me the moment I learned how she influenced the lives around her. The more I read her interviews and listened to her lectures the more captivated I became. Erin Gruwell influenced her students to graduate, started the Freedom Writer’s Diary, and trains other urban area teachers.
One of the most significant things Gruwell did was influence her students to graduate. According to Erin Gruwell’s Autobiography, she had a classroom full of students who lived in racially divided communities and broken homes. Many of her students felt like an education had nothing to do with their lives. After all, they had bigger problems to worry about like if they would still be alive tomorrow. She really wanted to show them how important an education was. So, Gruwell use the Diary of Anne Frank to show them how similar their lives were to Anne. She also had her students write in composition books about anything

According to Gruwell’s interview on Atlantic.com, she wanted to share her students’ stories with other kids in their situation, and show them how they can use an education to overcome their situation. Erin Gruwell turned her students’ daily journal entries about their life struggles into a book titled, The Freedom Writer’s diary, which eventually got published. This book influenced kids across the country because they saw what an education could do, and that they can overcome any situation in their lives. In 2012, Erin Gruwell said the Freedom Writer’s Diary is the go to book in juvenile