Personal Journals A Key To Success

I know I spent a lot of time alone in my room, scribbling furiously in a journal when I was growing up. Pouring everything down onto a piece of paper, facing your own emotions in stark ink can really help you gain some perspective in your life. In Philadelphia, one school is helping their students by incorporating journal keeping into their English classes. Called The Freedom Writers project, teens write down their emotions in journals and then read them out loud in class.

One student's journal entry is titled "Man Enough" and is a heartbreaking personal account of how he feels about his father.

The young man, who writes with such clarity about his pain, is 14 year old Trey McCloud. He says that when he reads out loud, he feels a lot of respect. His teacher, Mr. Galbraith says:

Erin Gruwell, a teacher from California, is credited for beginning The Freedom Writers. All 150 of his first students ended up going to college. For now, it is not taught in the general curriculum of government operated schools, but many people involved in the project hope that it can be. Allowing teens a healthy way to express the anger, frustration, fear, and pain of their lives, and incorporating it into school could, in my opinion, be one of the best things to happen to an English class.

Hollywood, naturally, has seen something in this story and is working on a movie based on Gruwell and his first pupils.



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We watched a documentary about this in my Teacher Education Program class. It was pretty cool stuff.

Like sitting through high school English class wasn't fucking miserable enough when I had to do it.

When I was an English teacher, I made my students keep journals. I never made them share anything from them, even with me-- but quite often they would volunteer to.

Meh. It's not that revolutionary.

I'll make a movie about you.

I've been asked to keep a journal like that in at least two engish classes. They were less impressive in that one simply had the entries being read by the teacher and then graded, and the other had enforced reading in front of the class when the teacher approved of them (the entries were still very much graded). In the second class the teacher one day thought it would be okay, just so long as she didn't actually tell the class that I had written it, to use one of my journal entries as an example of the sort of writing somebody would do if they were particularly sick and messed up. She read it out loud to the class and had everybody discuss what was wrong with it. Everybody could tell I had written it, probably because I looked as horrible and miserable as I felt.

Well, everything in context: there was also the first time I ever wrote a poem. I had, in several english classes, absolutely refused to write poetry and taken zeros on assignments. I'm not really sure why I did that. FInally, in high school, I one day just decided that I wanted to write a poem. I woke up one day and discovered this poem forming in my head all by itself. Honestly, it was a pretty crappy piece of amatuer writing but as a kid I was very proud of it. I was so proud of it I even went so far as to show it to my english teacher at the time, who I sort of liked. She asked if she could borrow it. I said yes and gave it to her. She apparently took it and showed it to some mental health people because after she gave it back to me the following monday my appointments with school counselors dramatically increased.

Is it any surprise to you that this journal program makes me feel queasy?
To be honest, it actually terrifies me. I would absolutely never participate. It could be okay just so long as there is no grading and participation is not at all required.

I found the story interesting, with the possibility of students finding new ways to express themselves within an environment which, in my opinion, tends to repress a lot of personal expression. I can see the bad and good side of a program like this.

That's how I felt about everything in high school.

If the only thing we were graded on and required to participate in throughout high school was a personal journal, I probably could have gone to Stanford.

I applaud teachers who find new ways to try to get students to participate. For our final project in English my senior year, my teacher had us write, edit, and film a horror movie. It was the only time that I ever saw everyone in my class excited about something. Not only was it a fun way to end your high school career, it got students thinking and writing and being creative, and that is something that is sorely lacking in a lot of classes.

The good being freedom of expression,some form of creativity.

The bad somebody getting a hold of a "personal" journal because it's really school property and chastising a kid who wrote something the school doesn't approve of.

I was thinking of the bad being something as simple as giving some blockhead another reason to beat on a less athletic student . I think it's not a bad idea , I just wonder how realistic it is in a normal high school setting .

Mine would have been a boring badly written run down of the TV shows I watched and chatting to people on yahoo in fact it would be like my blog is now lol

Oh man, I almost got insanely pretentious about sensationally fascinating journal writing to the point of quoting Oscar Wilde. Someone probably would have slapped me had I printed it.

I don't know you seem intelligent enough to pull it off. I would just get verbally slapped for even considering it.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, there's a quote where the character Gwendolyn Fairfax says "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on a train." That's the whole fun of journal writing: to remind yourself that your life (which you may think of as boring on an everyday basis) is undoubtedly singular and thrilling.

*cringes in awaitment of physical pain to the face*

*pats you on the back*

That wasn't so bad was it? It could have been a lot worse.

That said... I'd never have been able to do this in high school. I can almost gaurantee I would have done well in the class but had the tar firmly beaten out of me in the parking lot later.

Unfortunately, I have no physical pain to the face to offer you. I just wanted to drop in and lament the fact that my journal entries have always detailed the most boring and useless details of my life and, upon rereading them, made me wonder why I hadn't written about the more interesting things going on.

In conclusion, I suspect that 'awaitment' is probably not considered a word, Dictionary Girl. Go look at your Dictionary, Girl.

How many thousands of people have said that to you?

Great jokes in that play.
"Jack Worthing: I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we still had a few fools left.
Algernon Moncreiff: We have.
Jack Worthing: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?
Algernon Moncreiff: The fools? Oh, about the clever people, of course.
Jack Worthing: What fools! "

Personally, I can't stand journal writing. I've gotten into trouble with classes that require it.

You wouldn't believe some of the shit I pulled off in high school. For a senior AP Literature project I wrote a biography of the major Beat writers in the form of a fifty-page free verse poem, half of which I proceeded to read aloud in front of the class with a Miles Davis CD on the AV system whilst Alukh played bongo drums in the background. It was fucking awesome. I made my English teachers weep with joy, but I think the only reason I didn't get the tar beaten out of me daily was on account of I'm a girl, and even then I was cutting it seriously close.

IN WAIT OF, okay Smarty Pants?

And actually, no one. Congratulations!

Oh dear. If you had gone to my high school my diary would likely have been filled with terribly gushy entries about stuff like that.
And you would have probably beaten me up in the parking lot.

Are you kidding? We totally would have been in the same posse and eaten lunch at The Loser Bench together. (I say this not because you are a loser but because the bench by the computer lab and the handicapped elevator at which my friends and I ate lunch was actively referred to by others as "The Loser Bench" and was often stolen by the water polo team. We were really cool though, just nobody knew it.)

i have been keeping journals for over ten years and im 26 now. the only reason i keep them is to (hopefully) someday beable to write a book about some of the things i have gone through. some of it is good writing and some of it is just jotting down facts quickly so i dont forget them...but i love it...and i love the freedom it gives me. i can lay my heart out on my sleeve without everyone seeing it until its perfected. sometimes there are months were i just dont write and then there are days when i write pages and pages. it really is a good release.

i like what i have done even if it has only amounted to something in my own eyes.

Your school had water polo?

Sorry, this amazed me. Continue with the thread.