‘Freedom Writer’ Maria Reyes wows audience at the UEA Convention

Erin Gruwell was the headliner at the UEA Convention, but Maria Reyes – her former student and “Freedom Writer” – wowed audience members with her straightforward talk about trading gang warfare for an education. In fact, if Reyes gets her way, she’ll be the first Hispanic U.S. secretary of education.

Reflecting back on her early days in Gruwell’s classroom, Reyes said she was dead set against allowing this particular educator to change her. “I’d seen ‘Dangerous Minds’ and that wasn’t going to happen,” she joked in her address to new teachers gathered for the UEA New Educators’ Workshop.

Given Reyes’ life experiences up to that point, few would have predicted a bright future for this student. Reyes said she thought her life story was already written when her father joined a gang. He told her that the only laws were those of the street. Her mother worked three jobs and didn’t get home until 11 p.m. each evening. Reyes said she witnessed her cousin being shot in the back five times by police officers, who later admitted they had gotten the wrong man. “Dreams didn’t mean anything,” she said, “if you weren’t the right person.”

But Reyes was able to make a connection with Anne Frank, the young girl who nearly escaped the Holocaust. Gruwell had provided each of her students with a copy of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and Reyes read it cover to cover. “[Anne] spoke my language,” Reyes said. “The yellow star became the color of my skin.”

Reyes said she eventually “found her identity” by picking up a pen and writing about her life experiences – in much the same way Anne Frank had written about hers. Reyes wrote about what happened to her cousin. “I had to let go of what had happened and I had to find a new path,” she said. “For the first time in my life, I was able to rest.” At last, Reyes said, “I could speak to the possibility of something different.”

Reyes credits Gruwell with teaching her how to think critically. “Education is the thing that made a difference in my life. We’re in the profession to touch the lives of the Maria Reyes’s. It’s bigger than all of us,” she said.