Freedom Writers, not riders

After watching the first 8 minutes of Freedom Riders, I realized that our screening was Freedom Writers. After I got back on track and watching the right movie I was actually completely captivated. This movie is so emotional and powerful. I loved the message that it carried and my favorite part was when the one student stands up and tells the old woman who survived the holocaust that she is his hero, she says something like, no, no, I’m just a person who know what was the right thing to do. She goes on to say that that all of the students have the heart to do the right thing.

Also our reading was When Are Questions the Answer and the very first part of it is talks about how the best part of being a teacher is when students have an eye opening moment. That is really all what this movie is all about. The reading also talks about decoding, which is talking a book or a film and pulling out the deeper meaning. In this movie they decode the books that they read. Another point that is made in the reading is that decoding can be effective individually but is more effective in a classroom or group. Both individual decoding and a classroom of decoding is shown is this film. We get people reading the book and you can see the change that it brings in their own life. Then we also see the class discussing and also getting involved in their community to decode the text that Ms. G gives them. One part of the decoding process is to make sure that you are pulling from a rich media source. This is shown in Freedoms Writers when she decides to start them off with a book that is about a boy that is in a gang.

The one part of the movie that I did not agree with is when Ms. G fights to have her students for the next year, Junior year. I personally thought that it would be more awesome if she told them that they need to go and do good in the world. I thought that it was a good relationship up to that point but it was starting to become clear that she was getting close to crossing the teacher friend line. Her husband sees it and even leaves her for it. I still think that this woman is a hero because of what she did for the kids. It is important for a student to be influenced by a teacher but not to become reliant on the teacher.

Going back to decoding the reading talks about how we should be careful because we could have the opposite effect that we want. The reading uses the example of pulling together images of models that are skinny. What may happen is a girl may only remember the skinny, successful women, rather than the images she was supposed to learn form and see could fall into the very eating habits that you attempted to get her out of. In the movie I remember the one boy that misses a lot of class because even though he reads the book 12 angry men he feels that it is just a book and cannot change the reality of his brother going to jail.

Though this movie does have some ideas that lack perfection it is overall a very helpful movie to understand decoding and even to be decoded itself.