Have you ever heard of The Freedom Writer's Diary?

Your link goes somewhere entirely different than the foundation or the book. http://www.freedomwritersfoundation.org I think I'm going to look up the book as well. Thanks for telling us about it!

Hey Doll Have you not seen the movie Freedom Writers? Well yo must it was good! FYI My babysitter when I lived in Long Beach,California went to Wilson! xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

I have never heard of it pal , I will say that this world is fast becoming the "Big Brother" in the film 1984 , though xx

I will have to read about this when I have a little bit more time on my hands. I does sound interesting, though. Thank you. I guess this is another way of saying that censorship is, indeed, alive and well in this world.

I think it sounds awesome. I don't know why a person would not. You would think that anything (within reason) that helped kids learn...kids that really need more than traditional read the book and take the test learning. I think I am going to check out the book too. Thanks for sharing, Brightest Blessings, Mari

Yes, I have heard of this foundation and how it came about, and while there are many laudable things to say about the teacher whose actions started it, and while suspension of teachers over free speech issues have been troubling to me for many years, there are some other important considerations here. When a teacher uses something that s/he knows is going to be controversial enough to require parental permission in the first place, then s/he must always realize that this opens up a whole other can of worms. I have always tried my level best to keep politics and religion out of the classroom (except in courses on politics or religion which I have chosen not to teach) I never tolerated people in my classes putting others down whether because of physical appearance or ethnicity or their ideas, however, I think that conversations about behavior should be held mainly in confidence, one on one or in small groups involving only those participated in an inappropriate activity. The reason for that line of thinking, in public schools particularly is that under our US form of government we have a separation of church and state that government workers need to respect. When a whole class is forced to participate in activities which involve assignments that essentially require them to "rat people out" the public school teacher has overstepped his or her bounds and in my view no amount of "the ends justify the means" rationalization is going to make it right. I do think there are better ways to broaden a curriculum and that schools need to concentrate more on objective criteria. Assigning students to keep "diaries" tends to undermine this and turn education into indoctrination and that flies in the face of freedom.

no I never heard of it and as a writer myself it might be a valuable resource for me, I don't have time to look up the link and read right now because of the back log of emails but I will certainly bookmark it to read at another time.