Compare/ Contrast Essay Rough Draft

Rough Draft Compare/ Contrast Essay

In life our teachers can help shape the people we turn out to be. They are role models for young impressionable students. Most importantly they are our gateway to knowledge.  I believe that being confident, having a sense of humor and being flexible to the students’ needs are very important qualities for teachers to have. Once students can feel comfortable to explore their minds, be creative and ask questions then then they are able to see their true potential. Teachers have a very important job that helps shape our future society. Ms. Gruwell and Ms. Watson are similar in many ways, but they both taught at very different schools with students that had a different upbringing. They both wanted to be exactly where they were in their career and adapted to the students they were teaching. They did this by being determined and an inspiration to their students.

                Ms. Gruwell teaches English in 1992 at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California. The school does not have a lot of money and have some of the lowest scholastic records in the district since the school was forced to do a voluntary integration act. As a result, there is a lot of racial tension and gang violence on a daily basis. The other teachers at Woodrow Wilson are upset about the integration act, and do not believe in the students. As quoted by Ms. Gruwell, “What's the point of a voluntary integration program if the kids making it to high school have a 5th grade reading level? All the program is doing is warehousing these kids until they're old enough to disappear.” She seems to be the only one to care about the future of the students.  Ms. Watson teaches history of Art at the conservative Wellesley College for girls. The year is 1953 in Massachusetts. All of the students are very proper and bright. The teacher’s main focus is preparing the girls for marriage and keeping their husband’s happy. People who do not believe in the conservative ways of living are looked down upon. She asked the principal if she was proud of the girls and she said yes. Then Ms. Watson Stated, “Half of them are already married, and the other half, oh just give it a month or so! I mean, it's really only a matter of time! That's what they're doing here, right; they're just biding their time until somebody proposes!”

                On the first day of school Ms. Gruwell wrote her name on the chalkboard board while everyone sat in their seats surrounded by their own race. The classroom is very plain with the desks for the students, the teacher’s desk and a chalk board. She is very excited to teach at Woodrow Wilson high, and came to this school because of the voluntary integration act. As she was trying to take attendance they were all talking and laughing, just ignoring her. During attendance two of the boys start to stand up to fight and she says, “Please sit back in your seats.” Of course they don’t hear her or just don’t care. So she runs out of the class and gets somebody to break up the fight. At Wellesley College Ms. Watson comes into class saying” Good morning this is History of Art, we’ll be following Dr. Staunton’s Syllabus. The girls are all quietly waiting sitting in their seats looking perfectly poised. One of the girls jumps up to turn off the lights before she can finish asking for them to be turned off. “From the beginning man has always had an impulse to create art; can anyone tell me what this is?” The girls knew everything about every piece of art she showed because they read and memorized the whole syllabus. One of the students suggests they all go to study since they already know what she was going to teach them. Without her saying anything they all got up and left.

Despite the challenges that Ms. Gruwell and Ms. Watson face, they are both very determined to do what they believe is right for their students. Ms. Gruwell had the class do a self-evaluation and one of the boys gave himself an F after his brother was sentenced to prison. She was outside the classroom alone with him and said,

You know what this is? This is a Fuck You to me and everyone in this class. I don't want excuses. I know what you're up against. We're all of us up against something. So you better make up your mind, because until you have the balls to look me straight in the eye and tell me this is all you deserve, I am not letting you fail. Even if that means coming to your house every night until you finish the work. I see who you are. Do you understand me? I can see you. And you are not failing.

 It would be common for a teacher to not care if a student rates themselves as failing but Ms. Gruwell would not let that happen. In Ms. Watson’s class a student hadn’t showed up to class since she was married. Then suddenly she shows up to class and Ms. Watson tells her that she expects attendance.  Ms. Watson is then informed that the faculty turns their head on a few absences when a girl gets married. Miss Watson then says “why don’t you just get married when you are a freshmen that way you can graduate without actually ever having to step foot on campus. Come to class do the work or ill fail you.” 

Ms. Watson helped one of her students apply for Yale Law School, and she got accepted. So a disgruntled, conservative student wrote a newspaper article saying that Ms. Watson encourages Wellesley girls to reject the role they were born to fill. The next day she walked into class and said, “Quiet. Today you just listen. What will future scholars see when they study us, a portrait of women today? There you are ladies: the perfect likeness of a Wellesley graduate, Magna Cum Laude, doing exactly what she was trained to do.” She shows them slides of ads for women. “A Rhodes Scholar, I wonder if she recites Chaucer while she presses her husband's shirts. Slide - now you physics majors can calculate the mass and volume of every meatloaf you make. Slide - A girdle to set you free. What does that mean? What does that mean? What does it mean? I give up, you win. The smartest women in the country, I didn't realize that by demanding excellence I would be challenging... what did it say? The roles you were born to fill? It's, uh, it's my mistake. Class Dismissed.” Then she walked out. It was then that the girls didn’t have anything to say. She had finally gotten through to them.  In Ms. Gruwell’s class the kids passing around a drawing of a person with big lips laughing at it. Once it was passed to a boy in the front she grabbed it from him, finally got mad and made them close their workbooks.  She said “I saw a picture just like this once, in a museum. Only it wasn't a black man, it was a Jewish man. And instead of the big lips he had a really big nose, like a rat's nose. And these drawings were put in the newspapers by the most famous gang in history. You think they started out poor and angry and everybody looked down on them. They took over countries. You want to know how? They just wiped out everybody else. Yeah, they wiped out everybody they didn't like and everybody they blamed for their life being hard. And one of the ways they did it was by doing this: see, they print pictures like this in the newspapers, Jewish people with big, long noses... blacks with big, fat lips. In fact, life would be a whole lot better if they were all dead. That's how a holocaust happens. And that's what you all think of each other.”  

          In conclusion, both of these teachers showed the students a different path to go down in life. Ms. Gruwell showed her students that they are capable of being more than a gangster and opened their eyes to see life in a positive way. Ms. Watson’s mission was to get her students to see that they could be more than just a housewife. They both gave hope that the students had never known.