Sat, Nov 28 2009
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Published October 23, 2009 12:15 pm - Journaling has been an emphasis in Kimberly Rhea's communications class, and one that students learned to appreciate more last year after Rhea let them view the 2007 movie “Freedom Writers.”  The write stuff: Class motivated by teacher's story to better themselves w/letters from Erin GruwellBy Scott Meeker
smeeker@joplinglobe.com Tacked onto the bulletin board running along the back wall of Kimberly Rhea’s classroom was a poster listing “Ten Great Reasons to Write.” As the students in her sixth-hour communication arts class at Joplin High School listened, Rhea talked about the importance of keeping a personal journal — reasons that could easily be listed as No. 11 and 12 on the poster. “Everybody has a story. Everybody’s story is different, but they share a lot of the same things,” Rhea said, as she stressed the importance of not bottling up the bad things. “It’s important to tell those stories because you can’t keep all that garbage inside. You’ve got to get it out.” Journaling has been an emphasis in her communications class, and one that students learned to appreciate more last year after Rhea let them view the 2007 movie “Freedom Writers” that starred Hilary Swank. The movie is based on the book “The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World.” Written by Erin Gruwell, it utilizes the journals that she had her students write at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif. Today, Gruwell serves as president of the Freedom Writers Foundation and travels around the country to speak about her experiences in transforming a classroom filled with troubled teens into students who could value their own worth and have hope for the future. After watching the film in February, Rhea had students work on their letter-writing skills by penning a letter to Gruwell. It started as a simple classroom exercise, but the letters eventually found their way to Gruwell, who recently wrote back to them. “The assignment was to ask her three questions about her first year at Wilson High School, or to tell (Gruwell) what the movie meant to them,” Rhea said. After her class was finished writing the letters, she soon found that many of her students had taken it much more seriously than just a writing exercise. Brittany Botts, now a junior at JHS, said that she viewed writing to Gruwell as something more personal than a routine assignment. She said that she wrote about some of the difficulties she has gone through in her home life and the challenges that she has faced because of them. “It just felt good to get it out of my system because I’ve held it in all my life,” Botts said. “Some of them were very, very, very intensely personal letters,” Rhea said. “I was bawling when I read them.” 
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