Freedom of diary

One Ector Junior High teacher has changed the rules of engagement.

Instead of sticking strictly to the hard-and-fast curriculum tethered to the state’s ubiquitous standardized test requirements, eighth-grade English teacher Lori Low has a better idea — meet students on their level in a place where life’s hardships at home can fuel a fire in their fingertips that burns down into their pen.

Sure, she teaches her students all the basics they’ll encounter on the TAKS test, but then she takes it a step further.

“I can teach my students that stuff, but that’s just the basics,” Low said. “We can go so far beyond that.”

To Low, one must engage students before they can enlighten them, but the key to so she employs the power of diaries in which her students can take all the hardships and frustrations of life at home and focus them into the therapeutic outlet of a diary.

It’s a tactic she learned partly while attending a seminar at the Freedom Writers Institute in Long Beach, Calif., where she spent a week learning how to show her students that others just like them confront many of the same challenges.

She said the idea is to teach her students to channel that adversity, chronicle it, and eventually share it with others.

It’s a principle drawn straight from the best-selling book “The Freedom Writers Diary,” which is a compilation of anonymous diary entries written by 150 at-risk students in Long Beach who were empowered by their 23-year-old rookie teacher, Erin Gruwell.

Eager to break through her students’ isolation, Gruwell introduced them to iconic World War II Jewish hideaway Anne Frank and the more recently published account of Zlata Filipovic, whose book “Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo” chronicles the horrors of a young Croatian girl caught in the midst the Bosnian War in the early 1990s.

It was in this vein that Gruwell and her students wrote and compiled “The Freedom Writers” later that decade.

Still doesn’t ring a bell?

Two years ago, Paramount Pictures released the book’s full-length feature movie adaptation, “Freedom Writers,” starring Hilary Swank and Patrick Dempsey.

Following the book’s resounding success, Gruwell established the Freedom Writers Institute in California, where Low attended a seminar in 2007.

There, Low said, she learned how to pass the torch to her own students here in Odessa.

“That’s how I get a lot of students to open up the first or second six weeks of school,” she said. “It’s high interest. It relates to them. They know what that’s like. They know what it’s like to have your dad beat year mom on a nightly basis. They know what its like to have their electricity cut off one night and then have to go to school the next day.”

“I just tell them to tell me — ‘Just tell me your story,’” Low said. “It doesn’t consist of me giving them a prompt, per se. I just tell them to write their story.”

In addition to employing the writing methods in her own classroom, Low also has written a chapter in the next installment of the Freedom Writer saga, “Teaching Hope: Stories from the Freedom Writer Teachers.”

Low wrote a chapter in the book — scheduled to hit bookshelves this month — about the restrictions of teaching to fit the mold of state standardized tests that actually “demotivate” students. 

Much like the diary entries in the original book, the 150 teachers who contributed to the new compilation remain anonymous, save for the list of their names in the back.

A year of seemingly endless slew of back-and-forth edits with the publisher, she said, hers will be among them. 

Low, however, said she doesn’t mind identifying which of the entries was hers.

“Our job is not to please the administration,” she said. “Our job is to be here for the students. If you’re not here for the students, you’re in the wrong profession. I hope this book ignites that fire.”

But there’s one more twist in the tale of Low’s work at Ector Junior High.

Sometime in the near future, she said, a locally published book of her own students writing should be completed, though she doubts legal restrictions and other red tape will permit her to sell the book.

Not that it matters, she said, considering that the whole point is engaging her students. 

With financial support from Mary Hunt, president of Hunt Advertising in Odessa, Low has compiled the anonymous journal entries into her own local version of “Freedom Writers Diary.”

“A lot of people in this community don’t know the experiences some of these kids go through,” Hunt said. “After watching that movie and reading that book, it was amazing to me that they even survived. I wanted to help them get a chance.”

As Low explained the upcoming book’s release in her classroom Thursday, one of her former students, ninth-grader Guadalupe Holguin, poked her head in to ask about when the book will come out.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I’ve never written a book before.”

“Everybody was shocked,” Low added. “I had a few ‘Oohs’ and ‘Oh-my-Gods.’”

IF YOU GO

>> What: Lori Low will be reading from and signing copies of “Teaching Hope: Stories from the Freedom Writer Teachers.”

>> When: 7 p.m. Aug. 18.

>> Where: Hastings Bookstore, 3895 E. 42nd Street