When first-year teacher Erin Gruwell entered her freshman classroom to reach English, complete with a polka dot dress and matching pearl earrings, she faced a class that didn't want her, and certainly didn't want to learn about Shakespeare and Homer. In fact one of the students folded her her carefully prepped syllabus and tossed it back as an airplane.

"Why do we want to learn about a bunch of dead white guys in tights," he sneered. She later learned that his name was Darius. Darius and the other 150 students she would begin to teach this year, 1994, lived in an undeclared war zone of violence and drugs in Long Beach.

In a world where many of them had been to more funerals than birthday parties, they had no use for her or learning anything out of a book. Darius had seen his father die of AIDS and seen more than two dozen friends die in gang violence. Another student, Maria, was facing her third strike at 14, and often came home to an empty apartment with no food. Often, the lights didn't work either because mom hadn't paid the bill.

But through use of journaling and spending her own money to buy the class books about teenagers facing dire situations, like Anne Frank, she managed to catch their attention and make them open to learning. The plan worked. Four years later, all the kids graduated, she told a rapt lunchtime crowd yesterday at the WSSDA convention in Spokane, which ends tomorrow.

All the kids also attended college. They became lawyers, engineers, doctors. Many of them became teachers.

Paramount Pictures had made a movie about Gruwell's and the students' journey in a new movie called "Freedom Writers," which will be out in January. She's also written a new book, with a collection of the journal entries of the students, from 1994, when she first walked into that classroom with her Doris Day dress, to 1998, when they graduated. I bought a copy of the book, and it's a quick read and gives a searing insight into the lives of these kids.

If you can't wait for the movie, buy the book. Gruwell reminds us all about why we got into education in the first place.