Wrapping up the book were entries from the students as they were preparing to graduate high school. The book covered their lives from the freshman year to senior year. The reader sees incredible growth in each and every one of the students. They were all originally assigned to Ms. Gruwell's class because they were considered the bottom of the barrol. They were a lost cause, according to the principal, and Ms. Gruwell would be lucky if she even got them to make the occasional appearance in her class. Nobody had any faith in these students. Not their teachers, not their parents, not their peers, and not even themselves. That is what makes this story such a miracle. Ms. Gruwell inspired them to change their own futures. Some of the students said they didn't believe they would even make it to graduation due to drugs and gang violence, but they did it. They graduated after four years with Ms. Gruwell. They went from being the worst, most troubled kids at the high school, to being some of the brightest, most passionate students with articles written about them in People magazine and becoming the talk of the school.
This entry, Diary Entry 131, shows the immense transformation that occurred in each of these students. This entry was written by a boy who had only transferred into the class his junior year. His mom worked tirelessly to get him into the class in the hope that some of these other students' hard work would rub off on him. When he was younger, he had dreamed of being a professional football player. He used to play on a team with other kids, but by the end of sixth grade, he became too addicted to pot and alcohol to care about football anymore. He dropped his friends and began smoking five times a day. When weed and alcohol wasn't enough for him anymore, he began doing harder drugs, such as shrooms, uppers, downers, acid (LSD), and nitrous. He couldn't go a day without getting high. It was all that mattered to him. When he was switched into Ms. Gruwell's class his junior year, he was failing out of most of his subjects in school. It simply didn't interest him as much as getting high did. With the help and support of his new classmates, he turned his life completely around. He went from earning Fs in his classes, to being the second highest A in his chemistry course. He tried out for the football team, after having abandoned it for years, and he made it. That wasn't even the most incredible part though. He was offered a full ride to college for his academic achievments as well as his talents on the field. He would be playing college football just like he had always dreamed he would do.
It was the closing lines of his entry that really speak wonders about this student, and all of Ms. Gruwell's other students for that matter. He said, "I know I have what it takes and I am going to do what it takes to make it to my next goal, a college degree and an NFL career!" This young mad had gone from being a drug addicted, alcoholic, troubled teenager who couldn't care less about his grades or his old dream of being a football player, to being an A student and being recruited for college football. In only two years, he completely re-wrote his future.
It's easy to give up and think that life will never turn around once you've hit the bottom. I know that isn't true though. Stories like this happen all the time. It takes hard work and dedication, but it is never too late. My sister got mixed up in the wrong group in high school. Her freshman year, she was hanging out with kids who smoked and drank and did drugs all the time. Although she never wanted to do these things, she still wanted to be friends with them. In addition to her low GPA, she had completely dropped ice-skating, a hobby she had loved since preschool. Finally, she dropped that group of friends when they started trying to pressure her into doing the drugs like they were. She realized that that wasn't who she was, and as hard as it was to start over, she said goodbye to those old friends and started over. She began hanging out with the same kids she was friends with in elementary school. It was a hard transition and scary at times to try to start over in high school, but she did what she felt she had to do. And she was right. Her GPA climbed way up, her relationship with our parents and with my improved immensely, and she dedicated all of here time to ice-skating again. She would practice before and after school and travel on the weekends for competitions with a synchronized skating team. She even became captain her senior year. Now she is graduating from Indiana University with high honors and from a sorority in which she held important positions throughout her years there. She's not the same girl she was at the beginning of high school and it was her own hard work and determination that turned her life around. I know that anyone can make this same kind of change in their life if they really try. Even when you think that you have already established yourself in one role in the community, no matter how horrible your reputation and your history might be, you can always turn it around. Students like the one who wrote Diary 131, and even like my sister, are proof of this. I just hope more people in these kind of tough situations can find the same inspiration and strength that these students did and turn their lives around as well.
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