Quotes by Erin Gruwell

Because if they grow up holding on to such terrible feelings, it could lead to another war come time in the future when the fate of the country is in their hands.

I have always been taught to be proud of being Latina, proud of being Mexican, and I was. I was probably more proud of being a label than of being a human being, thats the way most of us were taught.

It would be easy to become a victim of our circumstances and continue feeling sad, scared or angry; or instead, we could choose to deal with injustice humanely and break the chains of negative thoughts and energies, and not let ourselves sink into it.

Evil prevails when good people do nothing.

It sounds strange, somewhat on the line between irony and absurdity, to think that people would rather label and judge something as significant as each other but completely bypass a peanut. ... World peace is only a dream because people wont allow themselves and others around them to simply be peanuts. We wont allow the color of a mans heart to be the color of his skin, the premise of his beliefs, and his self-worth. We wont allow him to be a peanut, therefore we wont allow ourselves to come to live in harmony. (Diary 18)

Fights dont solve matters, they just make things worse. (Diary 19)

Some teachers feel that if they ask for emotional help, theyre a failure. But teaching is a team sport.

I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student - and not to a test.

I am a teacher born and bred, and I believe in the advocacy of teachers. Its a calling. We want our students to feel impassioned and empowered.

Thats the beauty of education, kids taking lessons out of the classroom and back into their own world where they can positively affect their family, their friends, and their greater community.

When youre too robotic and scripted, the students tune you out. So I always tried to use different learning modalities - kinesthetic, auditory, visual, whatever might bring learning to life.

Hoping theyd been inspired by the examples of Anne Frank and other teens who had turned negative experiences into something positive by writing about them, I handed out notebooks for my students to journal about their lives. There was some initial resistance. But then the stories poured out of them, full of anger and sadness.

I realized if you can change a classroom, you can change a community, and if you change enough communities you can change the world.