Erin Gruwell was only twenty three years old when she became an English teacher at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California. Still filled with the starry-eyed idealism that had inspired her to become a teacher in the first place, Gruwell finds herself in charge of a room full of kids who have been labelled "un-teachable". Class does not go well; nobody pays any attention to what she is teaching. One afternoon she intercepts a passed note with a racially explicit caricature drawn on it. She is angry and tells the class that this is exactly the kind of thing that led to the Holocaust. The blank faces staring back at her make her realize that her students have no idea what this actually is.
She and her students begin to read The Diary of Anne Frank and Zlata's Diary : A Child's Life In Sarajevo: the opening of these books leads quickly to the opening of her students' minds, and Gruwell leads the class on an intellectual journey that opens their eyes and changes the way in which they think about both themselves and other people.
The students are encouraged to see how stereotyping breeds intolerance and they see the parallel between the lives of Anne and Zlata and their own. They start their own diaries, expressing their feelings honestly and openly. They call themselvesThe Freedom Writers, taking the name from the civil rights activists The Freedom Riders.
The kids arrange a Read-A-Thon for Tolerance to raise money to pay for Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who hid from the Germans with Anne Frank and her family to come and visit them. Gies is immediately impressed with the children and their willingness to open up their minds and learn. She tells them that they are heroes. Now recognized nationally, the children go on to graduate from high school and attend college - not bad for a bunch of kids only one year earlier considered "un-teachable".
