The Freedom Writers

            The Freedom Writers, that’s what we call the movie. Actually some of us girls in 10a didn’t have the chance to finish the movie because we had a soccer tournament that day when everybody else have it and learned more than what we have (I think some of the boys missed it too because we had a game on the same day that afternoon). To me personally, I didn’t count that “unfinished movie” as a disadvantage of my own because we actually won 1 to 0 against Penabur’s soccer team and it is also because even from the first half of the movie I can already learn a lot of things.

This is one of the rarest moments where I can be truly inspired from a movie that the school manages to play for us (special thanks to Mr. Eric). It may not have any deep connections with me to the position where I am right now, but it certainly tells me a different story of what I wanted to be when I grow up. At the other hand, this story told me about how education in America went since I have never been there before.

I have decided that to I am going to mention and explain 5 things that I have learned from the movie (the part I got to watch, of course).

1.      Being a teacher is super hard, especially when your parents didn’t really want to see you there; dealing with what they think you are not capable of handling. Somewhat, this fact shows me that there are times that your parents do not believe what we have to offer the world. But the good thing from this movie is that the main character (the woman which I forgot her name) has her passion in teaching and didn’t quit her job even though pressures are coming from everywhere around her. If she did, maybe those kids in her class never get to taste the life of learning.

2.      Racism is one kind of abuse to kids in the neighborhood if it happens anywhere in the world. Especially when there are war everywhere and kids are the victims seeing their parents being caught by the “white people” in the story or seeing someone being killed in front of their own eyes when they are still as innocent as babies. That kind of war leads to a lot of negative things when those kids grow up, like spending a lot of time in jail because of diverse crimes, never thinking of having enough study because all they want to do is revenge. It was such a devastating fact when one of the characters in the story mentions that every day is their graduation day; because they survived the day without being killed or being a prisoner.

3.      Following your dream and what you passionate about is hard but it is worth the effort if you try your hardest. There will always be an obstacle in its way, but it is actually a good thing because once you survived that obstacle, you will be stronger in your faith. As well as not giving up, sometimes it also tests our faith to God and not relying to humans because other human-being may disappoint us while God won’t. It depends on how we react upon what we want. If we give up, we might end up trying something else that is not our calling. But if we stay on the route, there is some sort of another inner happiness that we may gain. Once again, it depends on US.

4.      As what the movie title says, it’s about “writing freedom”. This movie is a good example for the public to understand that freedom doesn’t wait on those who didn’t care to lend a helping hand and take risks. But those “freedom” are in the positive things, not the things that will lead us to other bigger problems. The actors in the movie have shown how they unite the black and the white in class and to be honest to your own. There are certainly a lot of different stories of how freedom is written, but in this case, the freedom the movie meant was the freedom to live even though there are a lot of different races are surrounding us. Simply, this movie tells us to not differ races, because when we differ races, it’s the start of a shattered country.

5.      Admitting and accepting the fact of how you and your life story is. There are a lot of broken lives spending their teenage doing drugs and a whole lot of many other bad things because they cannot accept of what the past has made them. People can repair their lives to be better, but most fail by falling into the same mistake or some things that aren’t far from their previous mistake. So, the first thing they have to do is actually admitting and accepting how your life has been.

This movie have inspired me to be a better person at being a better student, be grateful that in my country there is no such racism war happening, and a higher dream in order to achieve my passion and calling. Of course, there is surely more of what I can describe if I watch the whole movie, but well, I didn’t (even though it shouldn’t be a reason to give only 5 things that I learned from it). But so far, those are what I could think of immediately when someone reminds me a very heroic story as The Freedom Writers.