Part 1: With passion, a class pours out troubles on paper

First in the series

Friday, Feb. 17 - Eighth grader David Leal stands at his desk and, in a deep voice, with a slight Latino accent, begins reading from his diary.

He wants his teacher to know what it's really like growing up in Philadelphia.

"I'm from Philly, the city people call Brotherly Love, where brothers have enough hate in them to pick up a 7 millimeter and murder their own blood. And as for love - it doesn't exist."

His 30 classmates at Olney's Grover Washington Jr. Middle School listen, rapt. Shifting from foot to foot, David, 15, continues:

"... I'm from where you can't walk to the street, let alone from the house to the car, knowing it could be the last breath you take... .

"I'm from where the style of losing virginity at the age of 13 is in, and where the boy's too stupid to wear a condom... . So there goes a child raising another child. I'm from the night where the bedtime stories are the bullets and the good sounds are the sirens."

That day in February, when David's class began sharing their emotionally raw journal entries, marked the start of an unusual and powerful odyssey.

Their teacher, Michael Galbraith, had embraced an approach to writing so new that there is no formal curriculum or body of research to prove how well it works.

Yet, it is so exciting that Paramount Pictures is making a movie, starring Hilary Swank, about Erin Gruwell, the Long Beach, Calif., teacher who pioneered the idea and watched many of her struggling high school students blossom into college-bound youngsters, eager to write and succeed.

The technique is straightforward: Get kids to write by writing about their own lives.

Over four years in the 1990s, Gruwell, then in her 20s, had her students write on such things as alcoholism, gang initiation, racism, homelessness and abuse. They also read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, to give their experiences context.

For Gruwell, the experiment became a mission, and then a book filled with the students' heart-wrenching essays: The Freedom Writers Diary. With 235,000 copies in print, it is named for the Freedom Riders, who helped integrate the South.

This year, Gruwell coached 16 teachers, including Galbraith, in her method, which encourages tolerance. He's the only one from Pennsylvania or New Jersey, and his class is among the youngest.

Over the semester, Galbraith's students would pour out their fears and feelings into their journals, while exploring the violence in their lives, their city and beyond.

They would reveal to their classmates thoughts that they had never shared, even with family.

Their attitudes toward school would improve. Some belligerent students would settle down. Career goals would shift. Some who barely wrote would end the year dashing off long pieces in metaphor and rhyme.

They would become tolerant of one another in ways that Galbraith had seen only once before - when he first tried the program in 2004-05.

"When people risk, they're willing to, maybe, love each other more."

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