By 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.”
Her students at JHS share problems that are universal for students everywhere, Rhea said, not just in Long Beach.
Drugs, violence, homelessness and family issues can affect teens in any part of the country, she said.
“The kids that I teach, the environments that they live in are not so different,” she said. “It’s not quite as radical as in the movie, but they do have a lot of the same kinds of problems, and they don’t really have a good outlet for expressing them.”
In one letter, a student told Gruwell that her story had inspired him to want to finish high school, quit his gang involvement and to stay away from drugs.
Tatiana Nelson, a junior, said she enjoyed watching the movie and writing a letter because it showed that no matter what problems a student is dealing with, there are teachers out there who will listen and do what they can to help.
Nelson said that she feels lucky to have one of those kinds of teachers for her communications arts class.
“There are some teachers who want to help us get back on our feet,” Nelson said. “Mrs. Rhea is awesome. She’s one of those teachers who wants to help us, no matter what. She wants to make us strong in ourselves and believe that we can do it.”
Jeff Jimenez, also a junior, said that Rhea has helped instill in him a much bigger appreciation for reading than he ever thought possible.
“To tell you the truth, I’m not so much of a good reader,” he said. “But when we all read together, it’s easier for me to read and to understand what the story is about.”
Last February, after completing the writing exercise, her students encouraged Rhea to mail the letters to Gruwell.
“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision,” Rhea said. “I asked if we could get a form letter back to just let us know that she had received it. I didn’t really expect to hear anything back.”
Last month, she received not one but two letters from Gruwell, one for herself and the other for her students.
“I made copies and gave each of them a copy of the letter,” Rhea said. “When I gave it to them, they were all reading it. I think it meant a lot to them.”
Sophomore Dustin Henson said that he had been inspired by Gruwell’s story to do the best he can in school. Writing to her was fun, he said, but he didn’t think anything would come of it.
He was excited to be proven wrong.
“You don’t get very many letters from famous people,” said Henson.
