1. 18 OctOber 11, 2013
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Tiffony Jacobs would never have
imagined 18 years ago she would
be traveling 5,500-kilometres to the
East Coast of Canada to talk about
her troubled childhood.
Eighteen years ago, she came from
a family where abuse was common
and where your next meal was
coming from was a nagging worry.
Sometimes, the family of six found
itself homeless and sleeping in
shelters.
As a result, Jacobs became a reclu-
sive teenager.
She was quiet, had few friends
and dressed like a boy so as not to
draw attention to herself. She rarely
raised her hand in class even though
she knew the answer. She spent
most of her time outside school
with her nose buried in books at the
public library.
“I was super shy and super quiet.
But I loved to read. I would spend
the majority of my day at the public
library, just reading books, because
I didn’t want to be home. So the li-
brary was a solace to me.”
Today, it’s a different story – all
thanks to teacher Erin Gruwell and
her English class at Woodrow Wil-
son High School in Long Beach,
Calif., a school whose student popu-
lation in the mid-1990s was divided
by ethnic lines and torn apart by
violence and crime.
Her classroom is portrayed in the
2007 movie The Freedom Writers,
which starred Hilary Swank and
is based on the book The Freedom
Writers’ Diary. At a loud, upbeat as-
sembly at Rothesay High earlier this
month, the book — a compilation
of journal entries from Gruwell’s
students — was revealed as this
year’s choice for the Big Rothesay
Read.
Jacobs, who will be visiting
Rothesay High on Oct. 30, is never
mentioned by name in the movie,
but her story is embodied in the
character Brandy, who is a compos-
ite of several students at the Califor-
nia school. Her writing is also found
in one of the numbered journal en-
tries — although she won’t reveal
which one.
“We don’t really tell our diary en-
tries,” Jacobs said in a telephone
interview from Long Beach, where
she now works as the outreach
co-ordinator for the Freedom Writ-
ers Foundation.
“Once you hear my speech, you
can go through the book and fig-
ure out which one it is, but that’s
not something we tell anybody. We
keep that anonymity and that soli-
tude amongst one another. We all
share that.”
*****
Jacobs found herself in Gruwell’s
Grade 10 English class in 1995.
When the school year started, she
held out little hope for her future.
Her family life was abusive physic-
ally and emotionally. Life at school
was also fraught with racial tension.
“When you went on campus,a lot of
the kids were segregated. You had
the cheerleaders, football players
and white kids in one corner, and
kids from different gang affiliations
on the other side….You had black
people and Asian people in differ-
ent corners.
“There were fights all the time,
especially outside of school and
on the buses,” she added.“I would
never watch that because I had to
see my mom get beat up and I got
beat up. So it was definitely hard to
go to school.”
The future seemed bleak.
“I didn’t set my sights high about
after high school, because I couldn’t
even think about the next day or
where my next meal was going to
come from. Just to think that far
into the future was unheard of for
me.”
*****
It was the third year of teaching
for Gruwell — Ms. G to her stu-
dents — and three years after she
had found a racist drawing in her
disruptive and troubled classroom
at Woodrow Wilson High. The
drawing sparked a change in her
teaching methods. She began en-
couraging students to rethink who
they were and who their classmates
were. She brought in Holocaust
survivors and other speakers and,
through writing exercises and jour-
naling,taught the students they had
a story worth telling.
The 149 students taught by Ms.
G during her years at Woodrow
Wilson High eventually dubbed
themselves the Freedom Writers,
after the Freedom Riders of the civil
rights movement.
Over the course of that sophomore
year, Jacobs began to gain confi-
dence. Through Gruwell’s encour-
agement, she began writing down
her experiences in a journal, pour-
ing out onto the page what she had
kept bottled up inside. Writing be-
came therapeutic.
“It helps you to foresee your fu-
ture and work out different prob-
lems you are having with your best
friend or your mom or some kid
down that street,” she said. “You
write down all those feelings and
you see them in a new light the next
day. And you handle the situation a
little bit better. For me, it was defin-
itely cathartic and helped me work
out problems.”
The turning point for her, how-
ever, was hearing the stories of the
Holocaust survivors who visited
Classroom 203.
“Just to be in the presence of Holo-
caust survivors was humbling and
empowering,” she recalled. “They
really got through some of the
worst things a human being can
go through and they are survivors.
They are not victims. Regardless
of the tattoos on their forearms,
they are survivors. To see that, to
see them with careers and families,
and how they thrived after that, it
showed me how resilient human
beings are.”
Hearing their stories gave Jacobs
hope. She knew she could escape
her home life. She knew she could
graduate. She knew she could go to
college.
“It gave me a light at the end of
the tunnel. To me, these people
were my mentors to look at life as
a whole and, regardless of what bad
things happen to you, you can’t be
defined by your circumstances. You
can’t let your circumstances prevent
you from reaching your goals and
from being happy and not be a woe-
Leaving old lives behind
Just to be in
the presence
of holocaust
survivors was
humbling and
empowering.
… to see them
with careers
and families … it
showed me how
resilient human
beings are.”
Tiffony Jacobs
Photo: Kâté Braydon/telegraPh-Journal
Arfan Hajizadeh, student president at Rothesay High School, checks out the new book, The Freedom Writers Diary, the new Big
Rothesay Read book.
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